Brush your hair and put on some lipstick! Word has it that SEIU will be at Summit Medical Center in Oakland taking pics for their new "membership cards."
As Tasty reported on Tuesday, SEIU’s trouble recruiting enough Zombies—to use Mary Kay Henry’s unforgettable line—to fight its losing battle against tens of thousands of Kaiser workers has led the purple monster to once again threaten staff with firing if they refuse this god-awful assignment. Despite these threats it now appears that SEIU’s leaders have decided to outsource a large part of the job to several temporary staffing agencies, including one that calls itself “TruCorps.” Job listings for California “Field Organizers” have been posted by TruCorps on unionjobs.com and include duties such as, you guessed it,“internal member education.” In this case "education" must mean "intimidation."
But, what is TruCorps? From the looks of its website it appears to be a run of-the-mill temporary staffing agency that uses the internet to pimp out earnest job seekers to a variety of unnamed corporate employers. But take a look at the “About TruCorps” section and you’ll see that among the handful of staff the firm lists none other than Jim Philliou as a “strategic adviser.”
Tasty’s readers will recall that Philliou was SEIU’s Long Term Care Division Director for several years. In fact, people in the know say that Philliou was leading the Tenet bargaining when SEIU decided to cut a deal with the company that would have given up workers' right to strike for ten years and allowed the company to subcontract up to 12% of the workforce.
Deals like this were at the heart of the disagreement between SEIU and the leaders of NUHW during the last several years. Recently when Mary Kay Henry was asked about the proposed Tenet deal by a reporter for The Nation she responded that it was just a “temporary misunderstanding caused by a ‘rogue bargainer,’ which she quickly corrected." Harsh words Mary Kay! And as readers know, Jim Philliou is likely the "rogue bargainer" in question!
How about that!?! First, Mary Kay throws Philliou under the bus, even though everyone knows that the Tenet deal was signed off on by Stern and Mary Kay, and would have been implemented if the pre-trusteeship UHW hadn’t stood in the way. Then Mary Kay hires the so-called rogue to help her staff the attack on Kaiser members! All’s well that ends well--for the SEIU bosses, anyway.
Maybe Philliou’s temp agency can help find jobs for the Kaiser members who were laid off last April, in violation of the contract UHW had negotiated under its former leadership!
A note from a tipster:
SEIU got quite a wake-up call at Kaiser Santa Rosa Medical Center, where more than 1,200 SEIU-UHW members will be voting in the election that begins Sep. 13th. Today, UHW's ENTIRE steward council held a rally in front of the hospital and announced they were resigning their positions as SEIU-UHW stewards so they can support NUHW! The 48 stewards issued this letter as they took off their purple gear and put on red NUHW t-shirts. Inside the hospital, hundreds of workers put on red lanyards to show their support for NUHW.
