Adios, Dave: Union Quits Coalition to Join Rival Alliance of Kaiser’s “Partnership” Unions

Dave Regan’s Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (“the Coalition”) just got smaller.

Last week, UNITE HERE Local 5 -- which represents 2,000 Kaiser workers in Hawaii -- announced its decision to leave the Coalition and join the Alliance of Health Care Unions (“the Alliance”).

Formed in March 2018, the Alliance is a rival group of “partnership” unions that bolted the Coalition following Regan’s attempt to seize greater control over unions’ decision-making process.

In a June 18th announcement on its website, the Alliance describes the development this way:

On Wednesday, June 13, the Alliance Steering Committee accepted UNITE HERE Local 5 as our newest member. Alliance Chair Kathleen Theobald hailed the move, saying “The union makes us strong – and the more unions in our Alliance, the stronger we are. Local 5 is a powerful, committed local union with experienced leadership, and we’re very happy to welcome them!” Local 5 represents approximately 2,000 KP workers in Hawaii.

“With our contract expiring in a few months, UNITE HERE Local 5 has joined the other Kaiser unions with 2018 expiration dates in bargaining,” said Secretary-Treasurer Eric Gill. “Together, we will achieve a contract settlement that meets our economic needs, builds greater solidarity among our allied unions and holds Kaiser management responsible to the highest degree of partnership with unionized Kaiser workers.  We appreciate the Alliance’s prompt acceptance of our union’s participation.”

In a post on its own website, UNITE HERE Local 5 told its members:

Aloha Kaiser Brothers and Sisters,

UNITE HERE! Local 5 was accepted into the Alliance of Health Care Unions yesterday… As a member of the Alliance, we will join 45,000 Kaiser workers from 21 other locals in attaining a National Agreement. That process has already begun. Local bargaining will also commence in the coming weeks. Please stay involved and committed to getting a good contract that benefits all.

Local 5’s departure represents a blow to the Coalition and SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan. Local 5’s President, Eric Gill, held the second highest position on the Coalition’s Board of Directors. Gill was the “Vice Chair” while Regan serves as the “Chair.”

The move leaves the Coalition with 11 local unions from three international unions (SEIU, the Office and Professional Employees International Union, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees).

Meanwhile, the Alliance has 22 local unions from nine international unions (Teamsters, Steelworkers, AFSCME, American Federation of Teachers, UFCW, ILWU, Operating Engineers, UNITE HERE and the KPNAA).

Will the Coalition keep on shrinking?

Definitely possible, say sources.

Tasty hears that OPEIU Local 30 is weighing a switch to the Alliance. Such a move would be especially embarrassing for Regan since Local 30’s Executive Director Walter Allen currently serves as the Coalition’s “Interim Executive Director” following the departure of Hal Ruddick.

UNITE HERE’s exit follows the departure of a number of the Coalition’s longtime staff, some of whom quit in order to join the Alliance. Tasty hears these defections are continuing.

Kaiser: "We won't bargain with Coalition unions or SEIU-UHW in 2018"

This week, Kaiser Permanente finally revealed how it’s going to deal with its now fractured “partnership” unions.

On Monday, Kaiser’s executives gathered about 100 representatives from nearly all of its unions in a ballroom at the downtown Marriott Hotel in Oakland, Calif. In attendance were leaders from both of the partnership groups including SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan, AFSCME’s Denise Duncan, Pete diCicco, Walter Allen, and Hal Ruddick.

Kaiser’s executives -- including Greg Adams, Dennis Dabney, Jim Pruitt and Chuck Columbus -- announced they will not bargain with either the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions or SEIU-UHW this year.

Kaiser, however, will begin negotiating in the weeks ahead with the newly formed Alliance of Health Care Unions for contracts covering most of the Alliance’s members. Kaiser says it’ll negotiate with the Alliance unions at a single bargaining table, although it plans to sign separate labor contracts with each Alliance union rather than a single “national agreement.”

When will Kaiser bargain with SEIU-UHW?

Not until next year, when SEIU-UHW’s local union contract expires.

So why is Kaiser bargaining first with the Alliance unions?

According to Kaiser, it’s scheduling bargaining according to the expiration dates of each union’s so-called “local agreement.” (Note: In addition to a single “national agreement,” each partnership union also bargains a “local agreement” that covers issues specific to that particular part of Kaiser’s workforce.)

It turns out that most of the Alliance unions’ “local agreements” expire in 2018. Meanwhile, virtually all of the Coalition unions’ local agreements don’t expire until 2019.

 

Dave Regan

Kaiser’s announcement on Monday represents a big setback for Regan, who attended the Marriott meeting with Greg Pullman (Regan's Chief of Staff), Bruce Harland (Regan’s hack attorney), and several others.

Why?

The Alliance unions will go to the bargaining table first… before Regan and the other Coalition unions. This will allow the Alliance to set a pattern as far as wages, benefits and working conditions that Kaiser will undoubtedly ask SEIU-UHW to follow.

That’s precisely the opposite outcome from what Regan has been trying to achieve.

Since at least 2017, he made multiple attempts to seize control of the Coalition so he’d have greater power over this year’s national bargaining.

Now, as a result of overplaying his hand and expertly exploding the partnership unions into pieces, national bargaining has been canceled and Regan -- along with SEIU-UHW’s members -- have been relegated to the back seat.

In addition, Regan has successfully destroyed the unity among Kaiser’s 29 partnership unions. This will likely allow Kaiser to drive further wedges between them.

How did Reagan react to Kaiser’s announcement on Monday?

One hint comes from the red-hot rhetoric that SEIU-UHW used in an update to its members after the meeting. Here’s an excerpt:

Kaiser said they will refuse to negotiate a new National Agreement, leaving each union to bargain their own local agreement… The level of arrogance and contempt from Kaiser leadership in the meeting was palpable. There is no Partnership in Kaiser’s mind… Kaiser’s idea of “Partnership” is more like a Dictatorship. SEIU-UHW and our Coalition allies will not stand for this.

Source: Kaiser Coalition Staffers Are “jumping ship”

Staffers at the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions are “jumping ship” following the decision by eight international unions to quit the coalition and form a new alliance of “partnership” unions, say sources.

Who’s leaving?

Maureen Anderson, a “Program Coordinator” and one of the Coalition’s top staffers for more than a decade, is one of them. And 4 to 5 other staffers also quit, say Tasty’s sources.

Why are they jumping ship?

Apparently, they’re leaving for the same reason that the eight international union recently quit the Coalition:

“They want out because no one can stand Dave [Regan],” says a source.

After the exodus of the unions in March, SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan became the “Chairman” of the now-smaller Coalition and has been playing a bigger role in its daily operations.

Here’s another interesting development.

Hal Ruddick, the Coalition’s Executive Director who was recently fired by Regan, has reportedly taken a job at the newly formed rival alliance of partnership unions. Tasty doesn’t yet know what role he’ll be playing there.

The new alliance of unions -- called the “Alliance of Health Care Unions” -- hired Pete diCicco as its Executive Director, according to a March 30 press release.

In other news, the Coalition confirmed Tasty’s earlier report about Ruddick’s exit and the appointment of Walter Allen as the Coalition’s interim Executive Director.

Two days after Tasty’s April 17 post about Ruddick’s firing, the Coalition publicly confirmed his departure -- calling it instead a resignation. Here’s a link to the post: “Leadership Changes in Union Coalition.” It begins:

Hal Ruddick, who has served as executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions for four years, is stepping down, and Walter Allen, OPEIU Local 30 executive director, will be serving as the coalition’s acting executive director.

With Regan at the helm, it sounds like there’ll be more rough sledding in the days ahead for the Coalition.

Stay tuned.

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan Fires Kaiser Coalition's Executive Director

Dave Regan

According to internal sources, Dave Regan -- the newly named Chairman of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (CKPU) -- has fired its Executive Director, Hal Ruddick. Ruddick’s last day will be Friday, April 20.

Ruddick will be replaced by an “interim” executive director, Walter Allen, say Tasty’s sources. Allen is the Executive Director and CFO of OPEIU Local 30, which represents 6,500 office and clerical workers in Southern California.

As reported earlier, Regan has been feuding with Ruddick for some time despite the fact that Ruddick was one of Regan’s loyal lieutenants at SEIU-UHW. In fact, in 2013 Regan put Ruddick into his job atop the CKPU after its prior Executive Director, John August, was ousted following wide-ranging allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.

In 2012, August became the center of a spiraling scandal after he reportedly sexually harassed a Kaiser partnership staffer who, upon quitting, turned in her phone… which contained comprising files and e-mails implicating August.

According to Tasty’s sources, Walter Allen plans to show up tomorrow at Kaiser’s national headquarters in the Ordway Building on the shores of Oakland’s Lake Merritt, where the Executive Director of the CKPU maintains a fancy, rent-free office courtesy of Kaiser’s executives. Perhaps Allen will do some remodeling.

Today’s developments are the latest in a series of dizzying events that have seen Kaiser’s so-called “partnership unions” split in two like a rotten peach.

Three weeks ago, eight of the 11 international unions in the labor-management partnership announced they were quitting the CKPU because they couldn’t work with Dave Regan, whom they accused of trying to orchestrate a power grab.

Days later, the eight international unions -- the Teamsters, Steelworkers, AFSCME, American Federation of Teachers, UFCW, ILWU, Operating Engineers and the KPNAA -- announced they had hired Pete diCicco as the Executive Director of their newly formed coalition, the Alliance of Health Care Unions.

Kaiser's HQ in Oakland

Meanwhile, Regan quickly ascended to the position of the Chairman of the Board of the CKPU, which has only three international unions as its remaining members (SEIU, OPEIU and IFPTE). Apparently, it’s from his position as Chairman inside the CKPU’s increasingly empty board room that Regan fired Ruddick.

Ruddick’s firing and his replacement by a presumably temporary “interim executive director” signals even more instability inside the CKPU. Tasty hears there's great nervousness among the CKPU’s staff about layoffs now that a substantial portion of its sponsoring unions have quit.

Stay tuned.

SEIU and Kaiser Permanente Plot Fake Publicity Stunts to Promote Corporate Wellness Program

Check this out. 

A source provided a copy of a secret plan hatched by SEIU-UHW and Kaiser Permanente that seeks to promote an invasive corporate wellness program that SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan accepted during last year’s negotiations with Kaiser. Tasty has posted a copy of the plan below.

According to the secret plan, Kaiser and SEIU plan will soon stage a series of publicity stunts to try to get positive media coverage of their intrusive wellness program.

Which wellness program are SEIU-UHW and Kaiser trying to promote?

During last year’s partnership negotiations, SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan agreed to allow Kaiser to annually collect “biometric data” from each of SEIU-UHW’s 45,000 members so that Kaiser can monitor workers’ weight (“body mass index”), their smoking rates, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure. Kaiser will then store this “biometric data” and use it to calculate workers’ future bonuses. 

Corporate Big Brother, anyone?

In addition, SEIU-UHW is deploying “Wellness Cops” (what SEIU calls “Wellness Ambassadors”) to 

pressure workers into losing weight, etc. ­

According to the leaked plan, staffers from Kaiser and SEIU-UHW and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions held a secret powwow on July 18 to prepare the upcoming publicity events, which will involve Kaiser’s new CEO Bernard Tyson and Dave Regan.

Interestingly, the staffers -- including SEIU-UHW Communications Director Steve Trossman -- gave specific instructions to deliberately withhold information from labor reporters across the U.S.!

So WTF is a “wellness recess”?

Good question. Apparently, it’s an event where workers are instructed to stop their normal work and instead do exercises for 10 minutes while music blasts in the background.

Of course, most healthcare workers are on their feet all day as they run from patient to patient, clean patients’ rooms, cook and deliver food, staff busy surgical suites and emergency rooms, sterilize equipment, push bins full of laundry through hospital corridors, etc.

The secret publicity plan from Kaiser/SEIU makes for interesting reading.

Tasty especially loves the part where Kaiser's and SEIU's staffers describe how they will "pre-write" fake posts for FaceBook and Twitter in order to give the public the false impression that people are spontaneously expressing support Kaiser/SEIU’s corporate wellness program. By the way, the wellness plan will officially be called “Total Health Incentive Plan.”

Here are some excerpts from the secret plan, which is posted below:

We won’t pitch to labor reporters. We will utilize social media; KP, UHW and LMP facebook pages and handles; we will use social media to build buy-in and create interactivity; we will pre-write some tweets and FB posts…

Once finalized, we need to move FAST and keep this mum to not get scooped. UHW and other Coalition Unions to turn out workers. KP to assist with management support… BUT keep it confidential! Will probably have to be done at last minute to avoid chatter.

The secret plan also identifies “commenters” who will be lined up to offer favorable quotes to reporters... including Oprah’s fitness guru (Bob Green), Kristi Yamaguchi and Tavis Smiley!

Interestingly, at the same time that Kaiser and SEIU are staging fake publicity events to show how workers totally love having their biometric data monitored by their Boss, the people over at WhenWellnessSucks.com have a very different opinion.

Check out their short video below. Tasty hears the fitness guru in the gym suit is actually Steve Trossman!

   Wellness Program Media Plan for Kaiser Permanente, SEIU-UHW and Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, July...