Last week,
workers at Alta Bates Summit Medical
Center in Oakland, California requested an NLRB election to decertify
SEIU-UHW and join NUHW.
The 857-bed hospital
is one of the largest in California and is owned by Sutter Health, the biggest
hospital corporation in Northern California. NUHW already represents the
workers at Sutter's largest hospital, California
Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, who voted to decertify SEIU-UHW
back in 2011.
The decertification filing at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, which covers approximately 1,000 workers, comes after multiple failures, backroom deals, and dirty tricks by
SEIU-UHW.
In 2012,
SEIU-UHW officials allowed the hospital's CEO to
eliminate 100 SEIU-UHW members’ jobs by subcontracting their jobs… even
though the workers' union contract strictly prohibited the hospital from
subcontracting their work.
That action
followed multiple other failures and backroom deals, including SEIU-UHW’s
agreement to slash workers’ health benefits and to block rank-and-file
union members from attending contract negotiations between the union and management.
And then
there's the case of Dominic
Mitchell, the SEIU-UHW union representative who was assigned to help Alta Bates
Summit workers defend themselves against the hospital's aggressive HR officials.
That is, until Dominic Mitchell announced that he’d taken a job as an HR
hack inside the Alta Bates Summit's HR Department.
Imagine
workers' surprise when their former SEIU-UHW Union Rep began disciplining and
terminating them. Purple partnership in action.
Stay tuned!
