SEIU Officials Raid Millions from Workers' Strike Fund

Some of Tasty's readers asked for more information about the following statement by one of the Purple Palace's picketing office workers:

"If SEIU was hurting financially, things would be different,” said Virginia Rodino, Chief Steward for the 148-member OPEIU Local 2 unit at SEIU. “But they just got done at our national convention saying how well they’re doing, so to demand a 3-year wage freeze just feels like a slap in the face…"

So…. why is SEIU rolling in the dough in the middle of the biggest recession since the 1930s?

Well, it may be related to a little-known raid by SEIU officials on millions of dollars of membership dues that are supposed to be going into SEIU’s strike fund.

Here's what's happening.

Over the past two decades, SEIU's Andy Stern and Mary Kay Henry have sharply boosted each member’s dues and then steered more and more of this money to SEIU’s DC headquarters.  

In fact, since 2000, SEIU has more than doubled the amount of dues that each member sends to the Purple Palace. And the total dues funneled into SEIU's DC headquarters has nearly tripled from $100 million in 2000 to $293 million in 2011, according to annual reports filed with the US Department of Labor.

Despite this giant sucking sound from SEIU’s headquarters in Washington DC, it turns out that Mary Kay Henry and Andy Stern want even more money from SEIU members! That's why they've implemented two little-known schemes to raid tens of millions of dollars from SEIU members' strike fund.

Here’s what happening: 

Under SEIU’s constitution, a portion of each member’s monthly dues payments is supposed to be deposited into a strike fund to benefit workers. In 2008, Andy Stern raided millions of dollars from the strike fund and funneled the money into SEIU's general operating budget. Then, in June of 2012, Mary Kay Henry conducted an even bigger raid by implementing “Constitutional Amendment #405,” which Tasty has posted below.

The amendment empowers the Purple Palace to seize each member’s full contribution to SEIU’s strike fund (40 cents per month) and to then funnel the money into an SEIU political fund. Now... 40 cents per member per month may not sound like a lot of money. But when you multiply it by nearly 2 million members, it adds up to lots of cold, hard cash.

Let’s do the math:  $0.40 per member per month x 12 months x 1,921,768 members = $9.2 million per year.

Here’s part of what Constitutional Amendment #405 says (full text below):

Beginning January 2013, the International Union shall use from the per capita tax the sum of 40 cents per member per month on all monthly dues received by the Local Union in the Strike and Defense Fund for the purpose of maintaining a fund to support the International Union’s program to elect and hold accountable national public officials for a pro-working family agenda.

So, do SEIU's members even know that the Purple Palace is raiding their strike fund? Unlikely. As far as Tasty can tell, SEIU's officials have never made this information available to the membership.

So, for all of you SEIU members out there, here's the full text of the amendment. And if you want more background on these issues, check out this report written by NUHW’s leaders in 2008 in which they criticized SEIU officials for precisely this kind of power grab.
SEIU's Raid on Workers' Strike Fund during 2012 Convention -- Constitutional Amendment #405
 

“We liquidated your $4.1 million strike fund. Now give us more money!”

Remember how Dave Regan liquidated SEIU-UHW members’ $4.1 million strike fund earlier this year?

Well, to add insult to injury, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry recently sent an email to SEIU-UHW members about strike funds. No, my friends… Mary Kay didn’t announce an investigation into the missing $4.1 million. Instead, she asked SEIU-UHW members to “please consider contributing $5, $10, $25 or more” to a strike fund for Hershey workers.

Well, ever since Mary Kay sent her fundraising appeal, Tasty’s inbox has been getting lots of outraged emails from workers. To be clear, workers say they’d love to support the striking Hershey workers. But isn’t that what their $4.1 million strike fund is (whoops!) was supposed to be for?

After all, SEIU-UHW’s members contributed lots of their hard-earned wages to build up their strike fund over many years. Then, Trustee Dave Regan parachuted in from Washington, DC and liquidated the $4.1 million fund.

You can kinda see why workers might be a bit pissed off that Mary Kay Henry is now hitting them up for more money for strike funds.

So what’s to be done? Besides ordering Dangerous Dave Regan to give back workers’ $4.1 million strike fund, Tasty has a humble suggestion:  Why don’t Mary Kay Henry and Dave Regan kick down a few pennies from their fat SEIU paychecks to help the Hershey workers?

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, these two SEIU fatcats earn more than a quarter-million dollars a year each... courtesy of SEIU’s members. To be precise, Mary Kay pulled down $253,660 in 2010. And Dave Regan pocketed $298,647. That’s a lot of f*cking money.   

So, Dave and Mary Kay, time to cough up some of your quarter-million-dollar salaries for the Hershey workers…    We’re waiting...

What Happened to SEIU-UHW's $4.1 million Strike Fund?

In the latest scandal to hit SEIU, federal records have revealed that SEIU Trustee Dave Regan liquidated SEIU-UHW members’ $4.1 million strike fund during the final days of the trusteeship. The news emerged just recently, when SEIU officials filed a federally required report describing SEIU-UHWs finances during the final three months of SEIU’s trusteeship.

Now, readers… you don’t have to be a Perry Mason to figure out this ‘crime scene’ or the perpetrator’s motives. According to records from the U.S. Department of Labor, Regan “dissolved” the strike fund just ten days before the end of the trusteeship… apparently so he wouldn’t have to report it to union members or take a vote of the union’s newly elected Executive Board.

Here’s what happened (see below to see the actual federal records):

• On March 16, 2011, the ballots from SEIU-UHW’s officer elections were counted and Regan was named as the union’s soon-to-be-inaugurated president after winning 8,000 total votes from the union’s 140,000 members (…this is a story for another day). 

• Days later, on March 24 and 29, Regan “dissolved” the local union’s $4.1 million strike fund.

• On April 8, the newly elected “officers and executive board members were installed… at which time the trusteeship ended” and the union was placed under the control of the new Executive Board.

So why did Regan cash out the strike fund during the three-week gap between the ballot count and the actual swearing-in of the new Executive Board? Well… during these waning days of the trusteeship, Regan was still running SEIU-UHW under the martial law of trusteeship that had allowed him to suspend the local union’s constitution, unilaterally remove democratically elected Shop Stewards, and take control over all financial decisions.

Apparently, Regan was super-duper impatient about the strike fund and couldn't wait ten more days until the new Executive Board was sworn in. Hmm… I guess Democracy Dave must’ve realized that workers might actually wanna keep their strike fund. After all, in 2005, when workers at Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center conducted a successful 60-day strike, the now-liquidated strike fund allowed workers to double their weekly strike benefits.

So where’s the $4.1 million? Hard to tell, since Regan cashed it out under a cloak of secrecy provided by the trusteeship. Dave...???

Note to readers: Do you wanna look at the records? To make it easier, Tasty placed key excerpts from the records in this one-page document.
SEIU-UHW's Form LM-2 for 2011 -- Regan Dissolved $4.1 million Strike Fund
If you wanna see the complete records, go to this site run by the U.S. Department of Labor. To see SEIU-UHW’s report, fill in the following boxes with this info: Union Name –- SEIU, City –- Oakland, and State –- California.

Next, go to the very bottom of the page and where it says “Report Type,” click on the arrow in the box and select “LM-2.” Then click “Submit.”

Next, a set of SEIU local unions will appear on your screen. Click on the bottom one, which says: “Service Employees Local Union 2005.”

On the next screen, click on the text that says: “2011 Report.”

Now you’re inside the report. On your keyboard, press the keys labeled “Ctrl” and “F” at the same time, and then typed “DISOLVED” (spell the word with only one “S”) in the box that appears. Next, hit return. It should take you directly to the place in the document with info on the dissolved strike fund. You can also search for other words or people’s names by using this same search box. If you're looking at salaries, remember that this report only covers the first three months of 2011 -- so you gotta multiply salary figures by "4" to get annual salaries.