SEIU’s Dave Regan Loses Another Court Battle to California Hospital Association

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan lost yet another legal battle to the California Hospital Association (CHA) over his secretive, sweetheart deal with hospital CEOs.

On January 13, 2017, a Sacramento County (Calif.) Superior Court judge effectively tossed out Regan’s personal lawsuit against CHA’s CEO, Duane Dauner, and three other CHA officials. Instead, the judge ordered Regan’s allegations to be sent to binding arbitration, as required by Regan’s secret 2014 “partnership” deal with the CHA.

A copy of the judge’s decision is below.

Regan’s suit, initially filed on November 24, 2015, alleges that four top leaders of the CHA violated their “fiduciary duties,” committed “dishonest acts and gross abuses of authority and discretion,” and carried out “unlawful conduct” by “undermining” Regan’s scheme to secure billions more dollars of Medicaid funding for California’s hospital corporations.

Why was Regan trying to put more taxpayer money in hospital corporations’ pockets?

It was one of the requirements of his secret deal with the CHA. Specifically, hospital CEOs required Regan to deliver $6 billion a year in additional revenues to California hospital corporations as the price for “buying” special treatment from CEOs during SEIU unionization campaigns.

And that’s not the only concession Regan gave to hospital CEOs.

 

Dave Regan and Duane Dauner

He also agreed to force any newly organized workers into cheap, pre-negotiated SEIU-UHW labor contracts that included a ban on strikes and a far-reaching gag clause barring SEIU-UHW from criticizing hospital companies and their gold-plated executives.

Regan’s lawsuit is yet another piece of the paper trail documenting “Wall Street” Dave’s backroom deals with hospital CEOs.

The suit also offers a window into the internal battles raging between SEIU’s officials. For example, Regan’s lawsuit says Dauner met “secretly” with officials from SEIU to “undermine” Regan’s Medicaid funding scheme.

Which SEIU officials?

LaPhonza Butler (President of SEIU Local 2015) and Jon Youngdahl (former Executive Director of SEIU California State Council), says Regan.

According to Regan’s suit, SEIU officials undercut him by telling Dauner that “UHW and its president, Plaintiff Regan, would soon lose half its membership and that Defendant Dauner needed to deal with Butler and the SEIU State Council – not Regan and UHW – if he wanted to accomplish any legislative and policy goals that were important to CHA’s members.”

Jon Youngdahl

Last spring, Tasty published a leaked 30-page document containing the questions that SEIU-UHW attorneys posed to Dauner during a closed-door legal proceeding, including grilling him about Dauner’s meetings with SEIU’s LaPhonza Butler and Jon Youngdahl.

Elsewhere in the suit, Regan alleges that Dauner “sabotaged” him and “hid” his activities from Regan and others.

Regan’s suit seeks Dauner’s removal from the board of directors of “Caring for Californians,” a partnership organization jointly established by CHA and SEIU-UHW following their 2014 deal. The organization was funded with $50 million that Regan and Dauner diverted from their organizations’ coffers.

Regan and Dauner are the Co-Chairs of “Caring for Californians.” The remaining seats on its Board of Directors are split evenly between CHA and SEIU-UHW. That’s why Regan also sued Greg Adams (Group President at Kaiser Permanente), Mark Laret (CEO of UCSF Medical Center), and James Holmes (CEO of Redlands Community Hospital). They’re CHA’s appointees to the “Caring for Californians” board, and Regan alleges they, too, committed “unlawful conduct” and violations of their fiduciary duties.

So who did Regan appoint to fill SEIU-UHW’s seats on the board?

Three SEIU-UHW staffers: Dave Kieffer, Cass Gualvez, and Arianna Jimenez.

With last month’s ruling in Sacramento Superior Court, Regan has maintained a perfect winless record in the multiple lawsuits that followed the collapse of his secret deal with the CHA.

In June of 2016, for example, a Superior Court judge ordered SEIU-UHW to withdraw a statewide initiative from the California ballot or face millions of dollars in penalties. In November 2016, the court ordered SEIU-UHW to submit to binding arbitration over Regan’s refusal to return $34 million to CHA and SEIU-UHW.

 

LaPhonza Butler

What’s next for Dave?

Regan, who is rumored to be stepping down from his position as SEIU-UHW’s president, apparently will be wrapped up in lawsuits for the foreseeable future.  

At least one question remains unclear. 

Who will fund Regan’s lawsuits after he steps down? In the suit discussed in this post, Regan sued as an individual, not as SEIU-UHW. Should SEIU-UHW’s members continue to pay tens of thousands of dollars to litigate Regan’s personal lawsuit? 

  Judge Orders Arbitration in Lawsuit by Dave Regan (SEIU-UHW) vs. California Hospital Association: 01-13-201... by tastysternburger on Scribd

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is Interrogated by California Hospital Association in Court-Ordered Arbitration Hearing

Dave Regan and Duane Dauner

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is in the midst of a three-day arbitration hearing in Emeryville, Calif., where attorneys from the California Hospital Association (CHA) are questioning him over SEIU-UHW’s alleged violations of their secret partnership deal and a gag clause.

The hearing, which is taking place at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Emeryville, began May 5 and is scheduled to conclude tomorrow afternoon, May 7. Both Regan and CHA CEO Duane Dauner are testifying at the hearing, which is close to the public.

According to Tasty's sources, the testimony is offering jaw-dropping details about SEIU-UHW’s intimate relationship with hospital CEOs. For example…

• Regan met secretly with hospital CEOs at fancy hotels across California including a July 10, 2015 meeting at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego, Calif., where the cheapest room costs $545 a night … and the Villa Brisa Suite will set you back $5,000 a night. 

• During the summer of 2015, Dauner began discussions with Regan’s opponents, which ultimately led him to dump Regan so he could ink an alternative deal. Testimony described Dauner’s contacts with Jon Youngdahl (Executive Director of the SEIU California State Council), Laphonza Butler (President of SEIU California State Council), Dustin Corcoran (CEO of the California Medical Association), and leaders of the California Teachers Association. Butler is a close ally of SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.

• During the summer and fall of 2015, Dauner had multiple phone conversations with California Gov. Jerry Brown about plans for ballot initiatives to pour billions more dollars into hospital industry coffers.

The arbitration hearing, now under way in Emeryville, was ordered by a Superior Court judge. After

Regan met with hospital CEOs at the Fairmont Grand del Mar

the CHA first requested arbitration to deal with SEIU-UHW’s multiple alleged violations of their secret partnership deal, Regan simply refused to show up.

The CHA then sued SEIU-UHW in Sacramento Superior Court. 

In March, a judge ordered Regan to submit to binding arbitration. 

And just three weeks ago, SEIU-UHW lost a last-ditch appeal to escape the arbitration hearings, thereby landing him in the Emeryville hotel to be questioned by CHA attorneys.

Stay tuned! 

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan Launches New Attacks against SEIU Leaders: "The Shame of SEIU"

A source has leaked two letters penned by SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan that describe his deepening war with SEIU leaders. (The letters are viewable below.) 

In June, Regan leaked an earlier attack memo to the press that targeted SEIU President Mary Kay Henry ("Who’s Gonna Bell the Cat?").

In his latest letters, Regan says he is "repulsed and disgusted" by SEIU’s leaders who are selfishly pursuing "control, internal power and organizational dominance."

And that's just the beginning of Regan's rant.

In an "Open Letter to Leaders in SEIU" entitled "What Has Become of Us? The Shame of SEIU," Regan accuses SEIU’s leaders of being "consumed with power and domination in the service of nothing but appetite."

In case Regan's phrasing seems a bit whacky ("in the service of nothing but appetite"), Dave's letter also includes a quote from William Shakespeare.

So, uh… what prompted Dave's latest poison pen attack against SEIU President Mary Kay Henry and SEIU officials?

 

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan

It appears that Purple Palace officials have stepped up their war against Regan following their earlier successful effort to slash SEIU-UHW’s membership by 60,000 members.

In recent weeks, SEIU officials outmaneuvered Regan by inking their own secret deal with the California Hospital Association (CHA), thereby driving another nail into the coffin of Regan's secret pact with the CHA… which, by the way, has been languishing on its deathbed for months.

How did the SEIU officials do it?

According to the terms of Regan's CHA deal, Dave is required to secure billions of dollars of new government revenues for California hospital companies in order to win the right to unionize 100,000 hospital workers. In recent weeks, however, Purple Palace officials teamed up with the California Teachers Association, California Governor Jerry Brown, and the CHA to sponsor an initiative that undercuts Regan's scheme for delivering billions of dollars to the hospital bosses.

This "chess move" has Regan spitting mad.

SEIU's Henry and Butler

In his two letters, Dave personally attacks Gov. Jerry Brown, the California Teachers Association, the Hospital Association, Laphonza Butler (President of the SEIU California State Council), Jon Youngdahl (Executive Director of the SEIU California State Council), and other SEIU leaders.

Oh, and Regan also attacks his former bunkmate, Duane Dauner (the CEO of the California Hospital Association), for inking a backroom deal with his SEIU rivals. 

Regan is so angry that he sent a letter to the CHA's membership trashing Dauner for being weak and ineffective, for selling out his members' interests, committing "monumental failures," and (more generally) for "the failure of Duane Dauner." 

Nice.

Talk about burning bridges. Regan's hate mail appears to signal that his "visionary," 21st century deal with the CHA is as dead as a doornail.

In SEIU's second attack on Regan, SEIU recently announced it’s sponsoring a statewide ballot initiative in California that competes directly with one that SEIU-UHW has been pursuing for months. Essentially, the SEIU California State Council and various SEIU local unions across the state are waging a head-to-head ballot fight against SEIU-UHW, which the Los Angeles Times describes this way in a recent article:

The fractious internal politics of one of California’s most powerful unions spilled into the movement to raise the statewide minimum wage Tuesday, as one wing of the Service Employees International Union announced a proposed ballot initiative that would compete with a measure backed by another branch of the labor group.

In his recently leaked letters, Regan attacks SEIU officials for conducting secret talks with the CHA:

SEIU's Jon Youngdahl

"These meetings with the Association representing all of UHW's hospital employers were never disclosed by either Butler or Youngdahl to UHW and clearly were intended to undermine and destabilize the hospital organizing work UHW was told to 'focus' on."

He goes on to attack SEIU's national leadership for being "insecure and weak" and also accuses them of "sabotage," "threats," "retaliation," and "impunity."

Here's more from Dave:

What are the implications for SEIU as a whole when the elected leader of the State Council takes it upon herself to secretly communicate with another local's employers and the employer Association for the sole purpose of sabotaging both the organizing and political work of that local?

What are the implications for the health and future of SEIU when UHW is forced to pay $2.5 million per year -- or be threatened with all manner of retaliation -- to a State Council that has license from the national leadership of SEIU to sabotage with impunity the legitimate work of UHW?

What does it mean when the national leadership of our union, and the state leadership of our Council, is so insecure and weak that they could even contemplate, let alone act upon, the sort of destructive behavior have recently been subjected to?

CHA's Duane Dauner

Cry me a river, right? 

It's always quite entertaining to see Backroom Dave -- whose snake-like qualities have never been mistaken for moral righteousness -- try to portray himself as the innocent victim of unscrupulous evildoers. 

Yo Dave, what goes around comes around. Ain't karma a b*tch.

Stay tuned for the next act of Dave’s Shakespearean drama.

Meanwhile, here are Regan's two letters.

  Dave Regan's Open Letter to SEIU: "The Shame of SEIU" (Nov. 2015)

  SEIU-UHW Dave Regan's letter to Members of the California Hospital Association on Duane Dauner (Novemb...

SEIU's Dave Kieffer Gets the Axe

SEIU's Dave Kieffer

Tasty’s sources were right on the money when they predicted that Dave Kieffer would soon be axed from his job as the Executive Director of the SEIU California State Council, a lobbying group that spends tens of millions of dollars of SEIU members’ money on political efforts.

Only one day after Tasty’s post, SEIU issued a press release announcing the appointment of Jon Youngdahl as the state council’s new Executive Director, “replacing David Kieffer who has recently decided to return to his roots of organizing and pursue opportunities to give unorganized California workers a voice in the workplace.”

The press release goes on to say, “All of us at State Council wish David the very best in his future endeavors…”  Translation?  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!

Where will Dave search for his roots? Well, perhaps the FBI can help him re-live those infamous times in 2001 when Kieffer helped cover up Tyrone Freeman’s multi-million-dollar crime spree against California’s low-wage workers.

Tasty predicts that Kieffer will soon surface inside SEIU-UHW’s office at the side of Dave Regan. Kieffer is infamously known as “Top Down” Dave for orchestrating secret deals with nursing home bosses that were widely criticized for selling out workers and elderly patients. In other words, he’ll make a perfect match for Regan!!