In a fit of
anger, Dave Regan recently sued
the California Hospital Association
and penned an angry attack against SEIU
officials (entitled "The
Shame of SEIU") after his erstwhile pals joined hands to introduce a
statewide ballot initiative that competes head-to-head with Regan's own
initiative.
Regan's initiative
is designed to deposit billions of dollars a year into the hospital industry's
pocket, a massive payoff he must deliver before industry bosses will allow SEIU-UHW to put tens of thousands
of non-non-union hospital workers into cheap, pre-negotiated labor contracts
that ban them from striking.
Why did SEIU
officials team up with the CHA to undermine Regan's initiative?
It turns out
that Regan's ballot initiative was horribly designed. According to one
knowledgeable source, "It would have blown a multi-billion-dollar hole in
the state budget" by re-directing billions of state tax revenues -- currently
used to fund public schools -- into hospital bosses' pockets.
By cutting school
funding, Regan also would have destabilized funding for other government services as budget-makers
shift budget dollars to make up for lost revenues.
That's why
the California Teachers Association teamed
up with the SEIU California State
Council, headed by Laphonza Butler,
to introduce a
competing ballot initiative ("School Funding and Budget Stability Act")
to preserve funding for public schools.
SEIU
represents approximately 95,000 California state employees through its Local 1000. Other locals, such as SEIU Local 99, SEIU Local
521 and SEIU Local 1021,
represent tens of thousands of teacher assistants, cafeteria workers, and other public education workers. California's students have suffered devastating
budget cuts during the Great Recession that forced massive teacher layoffs and skyrocketing
classroom sizes.
So, umm,... who
was the genius at SEIU-UHW who wrote a ballot initiative to strip money from
schoolchildren and from SEIU's own public-sector members?
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| Dave Kieffer: ballot initiative genius |
Sources say
it was Dave Kieffer.
Kieffer, who was involved in trying to cover up the Tyrone Freeman corruption scandal, was pushed out of his job at the SEIU California State Council in 2013 and now serves as "Director of Governmental Relations" at SEIU-UHW.
He was the architect
of an earlier money-for-members
scheme by which SEIU officials tried to trade billions in taxpayer-funded
Medicaid dollars for tens of thousands of workers at nursing homes.
Way to go,
Dave.
All of this
helps explain why analysts are penning articles like this one, entitled "Shrinking
Political World of UHW President Dave Regan," which begins:
We've been chronicling the ever-shrinking political world of union President Dave Regan, see here, here and here, for a while now, and recent news highlights his dwindling power.
