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| Dave Regan |
According to
internal sources, Dave Regan -- the
newly named Chairman of the Coalition of
Kaiser Permanente Unions (CKPU) -- has fired its Executive Director, Hal Ruddick. Ruddick’s last day will be
Friday, April 20.
Ruddick will
be replaced by an “interim” executive director, Walter Allen, say Tasty’s sources. Allen is the Executive Director and
CFO of OPEIU Local 30, which
represents 6,500 office and clerical workers in Southern California.
As reported
earlier, Regan has been feuding with Ruddick for some time despite the fact
that Ruddick was one of Regan’s loyal lieutenants at SEIU-UHW. In fact, in 2013 Regan put
Ruddick into his job atop the CKPU after its prior Executive Director, John August, was ousted following wide-ranging
allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.
In 2012,
August became the center of a spiraling scandal after he reportedly
sexually harassed a Kaiser partnership staffer who, upon quitting, turned
in her phone… which contained comprising files and e-mails implicating August.
According to
Tasty’s sources, Walter Allen plans to show up tomorrow at Kaiser’s national
headquarters in the Ordway Building on the shores of Oakland’s Lake Merritt,
where the Executive Director of the CKPU maintains a fancy,
rent-free office courtesy of Kaiser’s executives. Perhaps Allen will do
some remodeling.
Today’s
developments are the latest in a series of dizzying events that have seen Kaiser’s
so-called “partnership unions” split in two like a rotten peach.
Three weeks
ago, eight of the 11 international unions in the labor-management partnership
announced they were quitting
the CKPU because they couldn’t work with Dave Regan, whom they accused of trying
to orchestrate a power grab.
Days later,
the eight international unions -- the Teamsters, Steelworkers, AFSCME, American
Federation of Teachers, UFCW, ILWU, Operating Engineers and the KPNAA -- announced
they had hired Pete diCicco as
the Executive Director of their newly formed coalition, the Alliance of Health Care Unions.
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| Kaiser's HQ in Oakland |
Meanwhile, Regan
quickly ascended to the position of the Chairman of the Board of the CKPU,
which has only three international unions as its remaining members (SEIU, OPEIU
and IFPTE). Apparently, it’s from his position as Chairman inside the CKPU’s
increasingly empty board room that Regan fired Ruddick.
Ruddick’s
firing and his replacement by a presumably temporary “interim executive
director” signals even more instability inside the CKPU. Tasty hears there's
great nervousness among the CKPU’s staff about layoffs now that a substantial
portion of its sponsoring unions have quit.
Stay tuned.
