According to Tasty’s sources, here’s
what’s happening inside SEIU-UHW following this week's firing of Marcus Hatcher, a top union official,
over his alleged affairs with three members of the union’s Executive Board:
SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan
held an “emergency conference call” with Executive Board members who work at Kaiser
Permanente. During the call, Regan described the circumstances surrounding Hatcher’s
firing.
Until just days ago, Hatcher was the director of SEIU-UHW’s Kaiser Division
and also served on the union’s Executive Committee.
Yesterday, following the
publication of Tasty’s blog post about Hatcher’s firing, Regan convened a
meeting of top union staffers and members of the Executive Committee. Sources
describe the meeting, which included discussion of the sexual misconduct and “the
overall culture” inside SEIU-UHW, as “intense and emotional.”
During the meeting, rank-and-file
members of the Executive Committee suggested that the union hire a third-party expert to conduct an independent investigation into these issues. Top union
staffers reportedly said they “take these problems seriously,” but the
Executive Committee’s rank-and-file members left the meeting feeling concerned
that “this is all lip service” in response to the current bad PR and “that no
real investigation will take place.”
Interestingly, sources also report
that a second staffer, Mindy Sturge, was fired this week soon after Marcus Hatcher got axed. Sturge, a
longtime manager at the union, currently works as a “Coordinator III” in the
Organizing Department and formerly served as an Assistant Director in the
Hospital Division. At this point, it’s unclear why she was fired, although the
timing of her firing is raising eyebrows inside SEIU-UHW.
