SEIU-UHW: More Krookin’ at Kaiser Ratification Votes

Tasty hears that SEIU-UHW officials have pulled another head-spinning scam out of their purple bag of tricks. Here’s what’s happening:

At Kaiser Permanente’s hospitals in California, SEIU-UHW has been holding “ratification votes” on a proposed three-year contract recently negotiated by John August and Dave Regan. Remarkably, workers at more than a dozen facilities have voted down the proposed deal despite the fact that SEIU’s vote is a far cry from democratic and transparent.

Now that the voting is supposed to conclude, it’s clear that SEIU-UHW officials are unhappy with the results. What to do? They’ve simply added more days of voting at multiple facilities in hopes of changing the outcome! 

For example, readers report they’ve extended the voting at Kaiser Baldwin Park Medical Center, Kaiser Modesto Medical Center, Kaiser Walnut Creek Medical Center and others. At some facilities, Regan has reportedly added as many as four additional days of voting.

It’s equivalent to doing the following at a baseball game:  the Purple Team is unhappy with the score after 9 innings. So they change the rules and add 5 more innings in hopes they’ll end up on top by the end of the 14^th inning. And if they don’t, Tasty will bet dollars to donuts that they’ll pull another trick from their bag.

So what’s happening as Regan prepares for extra innings?  Readers report that SEIU has assigned more staffers and “Lost-Timers” to patrol the floors of Kaiser’s facilities so they can target workers to vote for SEIU’s deal.

At Kaiser Baldwin Park, workers literally stumbled across “extra-inning” voting in a Kaiser conference room. SEIU-UHW staffers had somehow forgotten to post an announcement about the extra balloting.

Finally, speaking of SEIU’s tentative agreement, a worker sent along interesting information about SEIU’s proposed “Partnership Tax,” which would make SEIU-UHW members pay a 9-cents-an-hour tax for every hour they work. The tax would be on top of workers’ regular union dues. If approved, SEIU-UHW would collect an additional $6 million a year from Kaiser’s 43,000 workers through the Partnership Tax.

So how would this $6 million be spent? According to SEIU-UHW’s summary of the tentative agreement, the tax would pay for things like training Kaiser managers on the union’s contract and “conferences on the Labor Management Partnership.” 

Gimme a break! Kaiser is making $7 billion in profits, but workers gotta pay for the training of Kaiser’s managers and supervisors? And what about these “partnership conferences”?  Do they include junkets like this one at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel and Spa where SEIU’s hand-picked favorites revel in steam rooms and poolside bars?

Here’s the excerpt from SEIU-UHW’s summary about the Partnership Tax. (Click on image to enlarge)

Reports from SEIU-UHW's Ratification Votes at Kaiser Permanente

What’s going on with SEIU-UHW’s contract ratification vote at Kaiser Permanente? Well, Tasty has been getting lots of interesting reports from workers who describe scenes like this one:

I went to vote and there were 7 SEIU reps in purple shirts inside the voting room. 7 of them. They check your name on a list and then you have to mark the ballot on a table right in front of them. No privacy. They can see how your voting! It was intimidating. Why do they need 7 people to watch us vote. Oh yeah, and there were no copies of the agreement in the room for us to look at. NUHW is the only one whose handing out the agreement to employees.

Other reports include these:

• SEIU blocked many workers from voting because their names don’t appear on SEIU’s list. In one case, SEIU’s staffers even blocked a union member “in good standing” who’s been paying full union dues for 18 years.
• In several facilities, SEIU-UHW staffers forced union members to leave the voting room because they were “asking too many questions” about SEIU’s tentative agreement.
• At many sites, SEIU staffers are pressuring workers to vote "yes" on the proposed agreement.
• In at least one case, a worker reports that SEIU had pre-marked his ballot when he showed up to vote.

At Kaiser Modesto Medical Center, a worker tried to 'watch-dog' the vote by sitting quietly in the voting room to observe her union's balloting process. An SEIU-UHW staffer named Jared Mayhugh quickly put an end to that. He had her removed by four Kaiser security guards.

So how are workers voting? Well, Tasty hears that SEIU is only doing public counts of the ballots in some facilities. In other facilities, they simply take away the ballot boxes at the end of the day. At one site where SEIU actually counted the ballots, they discovered that there were more ballots in the box than the number of people who’d been checked off on the list of voters. When people said “WTF!,” an SEIU staffer replied, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out when we get back to the office.”

Despite SEIU’s dirty tricks, workers at more than a half dozen sites have actually succeeded in voting down SEIU’s tentative agreements! Tasty hears this happened at Modesto Medical Center, Stockton, Livermore, Delta Fair, Modesto Bangs Clinic and Alameda. 

Stay tuned for more crookin'! SEIU's ratification votes will continue into June.