Politico: SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan Spent $21.2 million on Ballot Initiatives

$21.2 million on ballot initiatives

SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan has spent $21.2 million on ballot initiatives since the 2012 election cycle, according to an article published this week in Politico. (Victoria Colliver, “California union leverages ballot initiatives for health care on its own terms,” Politico, February 5, 2018).

And, says Politico, he’s about to dip even deeper into the SEIU-UHW’s coffers.

This year, Regan has filed 10 initiatives for the November 2018 ballot -- “more referendums than in the past six years combined.” Yesterday, SEIU-UHW announced it’ll spend $3.5 million on advertising this year for just one of its 10 initiatives.

What does SEIU-UHW have to show for Regan’s multi-million dollar ballot-initiative bonanza?

Not much, says Politico.

Not a single one of its initiatives in recent years has taken effect. Of the seven statewide measures filed between 2012 and 2016, five were dropped before submitting signatures to qualify… [A sixth] was pulled before voting when an arbitrator ruled it violated an earlier agreement between SEIU-UHW and the hospitals.

 In a rare local victory, Santa Clara County voters in 2012 approved a salary cap at El Camino Hospital — but a judge later ruled the initiative process did not apply to health care districts.

If Regan is so fascinated with ballot initiatives, shouldn’t he be running a political consulting firm instead of a labor union?

After all, imagine if he’d spent those $21.2 million on worksite organizing, mounting aggressive contract fights to win better wages and workplace standards, training rank-and-file leaders, enforcing workers’ contracts…

So why is Regan pouring tens of millions of dollars of SEIU-UHW’s budget into ballot measures?

First, it keeps all of the power in his hands and those of his consultants and lawyers.

And it keeps the union’s members demobilized. No need to create strong shopfloor organization at Kaiser Permanente to fight concessionary bargaining when, according to Dave, you can simply file a ballot initiative. A demobilized membership means no threat to Dave's hold on power.

Thirdly, it lets Regan tell the membership he actually has some sort of plan to win. “Ballot initiatives – the new multi-million dollar miracle pill to solve all our problems!”

Of course, Regan’s ballot initiative strategy has another massive weakness. Laws can change. At some point soon, Tasty predicts the corporations will pass laws outlawing Regan’s use of California’s voter-initiated ballot measure system as a tool for exerting leverage on companies.

What’ll Dave do at that point?

SEIU-UHW's Officials Run for Cover as Boss Opens Fire on Workers

Here’s another shocker of a story that features courageous SEIU-UHW officials scurrying for cover while two of the union’s members are left to take incoming fire from their Boss.

Here’s what happened, according to an article in the Mountain View Voice.

Last year, SEIU-UHW’s members gathered signatures and placed a measure on the local ballot to cap the salaries of the high-paid execs at a public hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Why a salary cap? Well, check out how much the CEO at this public hospital actually earns: a base salary of $695,000 per year, with the possibility of a 30% bonus for good performance; a $175,000 relocation fee; $147,380 to reimburse the CEO for the loss of bonuses at her prior job; and a $400,000 interest-free loan to buy a new house.

Kary Lynch, one of the hospital’s workers, told the newspaper: "I just can't see why anybody should be paid that amount of money.”

So, last November, Mountain View’s voters approved the measure, thereby capping each exec’s salary at no more than twice that of the governor of California.

Soon after the ballot count, the hospital’s execs filed a lawsuit to block the measure. That’s when SEIU-UHW’s high-paid officials went into hiding… and then refused to give legal assistance to two union members who were targeted by the lawsuit because their names were on the paperwork when the ballot initiative was first filed.  

Here’s what Kary Lynch (a psychiatric technician and an SEIU-UHW shop steward) told the Mountain View Voice:

Lynch said he'd like to stand up to the hospital, but that no one he reached out to -- including the SEIU and the ACLU -- would represent him pro bono. With no one contesting the hospital's legal action, he said it is his understanding that the Measure M case will be set aside by a judge, which will effectively kill it…

Lynch said he was disappointed about the way Measure M played out. After the initiative was approved by voters in November, the hospital sued Lynch and Laura Huston, another hospital employee who co-sponsored the initiative with Lynch.

Lynch suspects that he and his colleague were targeted because the hospital's lawyers knew neither of them had the means to mount a legal defense.

Officials from the SEIU-UHW said they said they could not represent Lynch as they were not named in the suit. Two lawyers who work for the SEIU-UHW-- Bruce A. Harland and Emily P. Rich, both of Weinberg, Roger & Rosenfeld -- did meet with Lynch, making sure to say they were not speaking as union lawyers.

The newspaper article finishes this way:

Harland and Rich could not be reached for comment, but Lynch believes that Measure M has been extinguished for good. Unless the judge decides not to set the case aside, even if someone came forward now and offered free legal assistance, they would not be able to revive the case, he said.

Quite a story of principled determination and solidarity, right? In the end, the officials at SEIU-UHW not only hung the workers out to dry, but they also took a disgraceful dive on the whole issue of limiting the public hospital execs’ fat-cat salaries.

So what’s behind this story? Undoubtedly, another one of Dave Regan’s backroom deals.

CA Hospital Freezes Pay and Slashes Benefits for 1,200 SEIU-UHW Members

Remember SEIU's concessionary caravan?  Well, check out the latest news from El Camino Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area... 

On Tuesday, hospital officials made deep cuts to the health insurance, retirement and other benefits for 1,200 members of SEIU-UHW. The cuts (see memo below) include...

“Implementation of 10 percent employee contribution toward health and dental premiums” (workers’ coverage used to be fully paid by the hospital); cutting retirement benefits for workers with 15-20 years of service; freezing wages for one year; cutting PTO accrual; cutting the maximum allowable PTO bank; eliminating workers’ education and training benefits; cutting holiday premium pay; and cutting per diem wage differentials.

Earlier this year, Dave Regan reportedly made a back-room deal that let management cut workers' benefits and freeze their pay in exchange for allowing SEIU-UHW to add hundreds more employees onto the union’s dues rolls.

Workers, of course, were none too happy when they started paying dues to SEIU at the same time that management and SEIU prepared to slash their pay and benefits. As one worker told the press: "What am I getting for my money? I'm getting absolutely zero."

That's why 500 of the hospital's workers filed petitions to decertify SEIU-UHW last month.  SEIU-UHW quickly deployed its attorneys to try to stop the decert election. And SEIU-UHW launched a fake “campaign” intended to show they were somehow fighting the cuts that Regan had already agreed to.

Meanwhile, hospital executives were itching to cash-in on their back-room deal with Dave Regan. Tasty guesses that the phone call went kinda like this: "Hey Dave," says the Boss. "We gave you tens of thousands of new dues dollars from our employees. It's time for you to deliver... Give us the pay freeze and benefits cuts."

So, according to a one-page announcement from management (see below), the hospital implemented the cuts on the 1,200 workers on Tuesday. Management's announcement starts this way:

“Last night, Tuesday, November 15, 2011, the El Camino Hospital Board of Directors declared impasse and voted to implement the Hospital’s last, best and final offer to SEIU/UHW-West (“SEIU”)…  SEIU has maintained that negotiations have not reached impasse despite the fact that they have offered no significant counterproposals to the Hospital...”

And all this... despite the fact that the hospital made $70 million in profits during the past two years. Looks like SEIU official are taking their campaign of crookin’ and concessions to a whole new level of criminality.

1,200 Bay Area Hospital Workers Request Election to Decertify SEIU-UHW

Remember this post about SEIU-UHW officials' backroom deal to cut workers’ retirement plan, health insurance and other benefits at El Camino Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area? Well, last week a local newspaper reported that the hospital's 1,200 workers filed a petition to decertify SEIU-UHW.

Tasty hears that Dave Regan and Co. are totally panicked about the request by workers. Bruce Harland (SEIU-UHW’s attorney) has apparently been doing back-flips to try to block the election -- even asking the labor board to impose an injunction to stop workers from voting.

And Tasty hears that SEIU officials -- including Lilly Vallee -- have been begging workers from nearby hospitals to come onto SEIU’s payroll as “Lost-Timers” to campaign for SEIU because SEIU doesn’t have enough workers inside the hospital to support it.  

What’s the story behind the decert effort? Apparently, the employees at El Camino Hospital are self-organized, and they collected 500 signatures on the decertification petition all by themselves. The petition seeks to decertify SEIU-UHW and doesn't ask to replace it with another union.

Why do workers want to get out of SEIU-UHW? According to the article, here’s what one worker said: 

  "What am I getting for my money?" asked Robert De Salvo. "I'm getting absolutely zero."

 Stay tuned!

SEIU's Concessionary Caravan

After Tasty posted this story about SEIU pushing concessions on San Diego County workers, readers sent in other stories about cuts that SEIU is negotiating.

In Santa Cruz County, California, SEIU just accepted a two-year contract for 1,500 county workers that includes a two-tiered pension system and furloughs that translate into “a nearly 7 percent pay cut,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.

In Las Vegas, Nevada, 3,000 SEIU members at University Medical Center took a 2% wage cut that’s retroactive back to May. A retroactive pay cut?? Tasty was puzzled, too. It means that workers not only have their wage rates cut by 2% going into the future, but each worker also has to pay back hundreds of dollars to the hospital that they got in their paychecks during the past 3 months. Tasty kinda had the same reaction as this SEIU member, who was quoted in the Las Vegas Sun as saying: “I don’t know if there’s a union in America that’s had to give back what they already had.”

In the San Francisco Bay Area, 1,300 members at SEIU-UHW are facing a whole slew of cuts at El Camino Hospital, according to this bargaining bulletin posted on the hospital’s website. Proposed cuts include eliminating fully employer-paid health and dental coverage (workers would pay 10% of premiums), freezing wages in the first year of the contract, cutting retirement pay, eliminating education & training benefits, cutting shift differentials, etc. The hospital is asking SEIU-UHW to eat the cuts even though the hospital posted $70 million in profits during the past two years.

One of the hospital’s top execs, who recently moved to a nearby hospital, reported that Dave Regan has already accepted the cuts… but kinda forgot to let the workers know. Apparently, Regan signed off on the cuts in exchange for a deal with management that let SEIU add hundreds more of the hospital’s workers to SEIU’s membership rolls. "Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours..."

According to workers, SEIU is putting up a fake fight against the hospital's cuts… even going so far as to "organize" an informational picket that involved only 7 or 8 workers. Tasty can hear Regan explaining it to the workers… “We tried… but we had to accept the cuts… There was nothing else we could do…”