Dignity Healthcare Workers Bolt SEIU-UHW, Leaving Stan Lyles to Swallow His Words

Stan "Mr. Integrity" Lyles

Some workers at Dignity Healthcare report that not all employees were affected by SEIU-UHW’s recent bargaining during which management demanded more cuts to workers' wages and benefits.

In 2015, a unit of workers at Dignity's Northridge Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles left SEIU-UHW after requesting an NLRB election to dump the union. The workers include clinical lab scientists, social workers (MSWs and LCSWs), radiation therapists, and nuclear medicine technologists.

According to NLRB records, the workers filed a formal “decertification” petition with NLRB Region 31 in Los Angeles. After SEIU-UHW officials realized they’d get trounced in an election, they decided to threw in the towel and let the workers go without an election -- what’s called “disclaiming interest in the unit,” in NLRB parlance.

Why did the Dignity workers bolt from SEIU-UHW?

They say SEIU-UHW never did anything for them... and wouldn’t even return workers' phone calls.

The workers’ action is especially embarrassing for SEIU-UHW Vice President Stan Lyles, who formerly worked at Northridge Hospital Medical Center. Lyes tells everyone he’s got “rockstar” status with his former co-workers at Northridge.

Not quite, Stan.

But... if you really want to see a rockstar performance by Stan, check out the following  video of Stan attacking SEIU for its undemocratic practices in 2008.

Lyles, speaking at a meeting of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), attacks SEIU officials for making back-room deals with CEOs -- including a secret deal with Tenet Healthcare to allow the company to subcontract the jobs of more than 10% of SEIU-UHW's members.

That's one of the dirty moves that prompted SEIU-UHW members to publicly criticize Andy Stern and SEIU in 2007 and 2008, which then caused Stern to remove SEIU-UHW's elected leaders through a trusteeship in 2009.

After imposing the trusteeship, SEIU officials gave Lyles a big purple paycheck to abandon his principles and pledge his allegiance to Andy Stern, Dave Regan, and the other Purple Palace officials whom he had so sharply criticized.

Lyles, who had aggressively opposed the trusteeship, quickly changed his tune. Ain’t it interesting what a boatload of cash will due to the moral compass of some people?

Perhaps that’s why Lyles has earned the nickname of “Mr. Integrity.”

Here’s the video of Lyles attacking SEIU in 2008, before he received his big payoff from Andy Stern:

"It's a war, of that I am certain, and it will not be pretty"

More details are emerging from a growing trail of news coverage about SEIU-UHW Dave Regan’s dirty deal with the California Hospital Association to undermine California’s landmark safe-staffing law. Below are links to two articles along with excerpts featuring scorching attacks on "Wall Street Dave."

Interestingly, the first article describes a new development: namely, “previously unreported letters” between SEIU President Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Rich Trumka that “show the AFL-CIO rebuffing SEIU’s bid for a larger deal to freeze out NUHW.” Check it out. Here are the articles.

Josh Eidelson, “Are Nurses Headed to War with SEIU?,” In These Times, June 19, 2012.

California Nurses Association (CNA) Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro sent a blistering e-mail to her colleagues: “It is a war, of that I am certain, and it will not be pretty.”

Questioning whether SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) President Dave Regan "has any principles,” De Moro called him “dogged, arrogant and an enormous embarrassment to the labor movement.” De Moro, who directs both CNA and its national affiliate, National Nurses United (NNU), charged, “the hospitals believe that they have found a way to weaken the nurses and their union with Regan in their power, and this will lead to some pretty nasty scenarios for the nurses, patients, and of course the union.”

DeMoro called UHW’s Regan “a traitor to his class” and a “symptom” of the increasing “servility” of the mainstream labor movement. Rather than fighting corporations, said DeMoro, “he was doing their bidding. Overtly. Loudly.” Watching it happen, she added, management must be “sitting back, drinking their wine, and laughing their asses off.”

DeMoro suspects that Regan “cut a deal that Kaiser would help stop NUHW in exchange for Regan helping them to go after the nursing ratios.”

Michelle Amber, “CNA Wages War against UHW in California Claiming Attempt to Suspend Staffing Ratios,” Bureau of National Affairs, June 18, 2012.

A war has erupted between two health care unions in California over an attack by one of the unions on the state's nurse-to-patient ratios

DeMoro said she was “stunned, shocked, and horrified” that a health care union, which also represents nurses, would attempt to overturn a regulation that was a huge priority for another union. Contending that Regan is working on behalf of the CHA, she said when a “union works for the bosses, it turns on other unions.”

DeMoro said this is just the latest incidence of Regan working “behind the scenes” with the hospitals against the nurses' interests. She said Regan has accepted concessionary contracts with a number of hospitals for his members.

“When the nurses begin bargaining at one of these facilities, they have to dig out from the hole UHW has dug that is lower than the employer would have presented” because it agreed to the concessions, she said.

Meanwhile, SEIU’s Dave Regan and Steve Trossman are making a laughable effort to defend their disgraceful actions. They claim they colluded with industry execs in order to give hospitals "relief" from the "dire financial conditions" that will harm lower-income hospital workers.

First of all, California's hospital industry is far from poverty-stricken. It's producing more than $4 billion a year in profits. And it's showering its CEOs -- like Kaiser's George Halvorson -- with million-dollar pay increases. 

Second, Regan is hardly a die-hard defender of workers’ wages and benefits. Let's not forget Regan's track record. He rammed giant concessions down the throats of 3,000 workers at the Daughters of Charity Health System by violating SEIU-UHW’s own constitution! And he and SEIU’s Hal Ruddick  blatantly lied to 14,000 workers at Catholic Healthcare West/Dignity in order to eliminate their defined-benefit pension plan and thereby hand over $217 million in savings to the company in just a single year.  

SEIU's P.R. hacks may try to put Regan in a Superman costume, but the opposite is true. Check out this insightful image, crafted by a creative reader, that tells the truth about "Wall Street Dave."