A California
hospital worker named Starla Rollins
has taken a fight to protect 15,000 workers' pension benefits all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Last week, Rollins’
attorneys asked the Supreme Court to safeguard the retirement benefits of tens of
thousands of workers at Dignity Health,
a giant hospital company headquartered in San Francisco.
Even though Dignity’s
pension plan covers more than 15,000 SEIU-UHW members, SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan and other SEIU-UHW
officials have refused to lift a finger to defend workers’ pensions.
Here’s
what’s going on:
In 2009
and 2012,
SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan and Hal
Ruddick teamed up with Dignity executives to implement sharp cuts to
the pension plan covering SEIU-UHW members at more than 30 hospitals across
California.
Then, in
2013, Starla Rollins -- a 26-year Ward Clerk at Community Hospital of San Bernardino -- discovered that SEIU-UHW officials had allowed Dignity to
underfund SEIU-UHW members’ pension plan by $1.2 billion. (Yes, that’s a “b”
for “billion.”)
Because SEIU-UHW
officials refused to do anything, Rollins decided to sue Dignity in a
class-action lawsuit on behalf of herself and her co-workers. Her lawsuit -- “Starla
Rollins v. Dignity Health”-- was filed in 2013. Tasty covered it in this
earlier post.
Here’s the
latest.
Last July, Rollins
and her attorney won an important victory in federal court after doing battle
with Dignity’s high-priced lawyers for three years. (See below the decision
issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Dignity, rather than accepting
defeat, appealed the court’s decision to the US Supreme Court.
Last week,
lawyers for both sides argued their case in front of the Supreme Court.
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| Starla Rollins |
The case
centers on the following question: A federal law (the Employee Retirement
Income Security Act) requires corporations to adequately fund their employees’ pensions
so workers actually receive the pension payments they earned when they retire.
Dignity acknowledges it has underfunded workers’ pension. But company
executives claim they’re exempt from federal law because Dignity is a
“religious organization” …even though Dignity has bought up many non-religious
hospitals. It even changed its name from “Catholic Healthcare West” so it could
re-brand itself as a non-religious company.
What
happened during last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court?
According to
a transcript
(see copy below), Judge Sonia Sotomayor
grilled a lawyer representing Dignity. Here’s an excerpt from her questioning:
[Dignity is] the fifth largest healthcare provider in the nation. They have 60,000 employees. Do you believe that Congress's vision was to let, what is essentially, a corporate entity opt out of protecting all of those employees?
Kick their
asses!
So what
happens next?
The Supreme
Court justices will publish their decision sometime in June.
What about
SEIU-UHW? It continues to do absolutely nothing to protect its members’
retirement benefits. Apparently, “Wall Street” Dave Regan is too busy polishing
the CEO’s shoes.
So... huge
props to Starla!
In fact, Rollins has been waging not one but two important legal battles against SEIU-UHW for its failure to support its
members.
In the
second case, Rollins won a
giant victory last October when a federal court ordered officials from both
SEIU-UHW and Dignity Health to stand trial for illegally laying her off from
her 26-year job and then refusing to honor her union contract’s seniority
agreement. Rollins was part of the union’s leadership team prior to SEIU’s 2009
trusteeship, when NUHW President Sal Rosselli led the union.
Let’s keep
our fingers crossed for the Supreme Court’s June decision! Stay tuned.
