Tasty hears that SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Eliseo Medina and SEIU Executive Vice President Tom Woodruff are preparing to announce their resignations from SEIU. If true, their departures would signal more turbulence inside SEIU, which last year saw its No. 1 and 2 officers (Stern and Burger) jump ship after leading SEIU down a disastrous path of raiding other unions and trying to crush dissent inside SEIU’s membership.
So what could be pushing Medina and Woodruff towards the exit sign?
Tasty suspects that the massive SEIU corruption scandal involving Tyrone Freeman may finally be catching up to Medina. According to court records, the feds are considering filing criminal charges against Freeman for stealing more than $1 million from low-wage SEIU members in Southern California.
So how could Medina be implicated? Even though Freeman’s corruption wasn’t publicly known until late 2008 (when it was uncovered by the Los Angeles Times), Medina and other top SEIU officials had reportedly known about the corruption for seven long years.
In fact, Tasty has seen transcripts of two sworn testimonies by former SEIU official Jim Philliou in which Philliou testified that he told Medina’s office in 2001 that he’d uncovered Freeman’s corruption. Philliou, who worked under Medina at the time, was so shocked by Freeman’s corruption that he refused to continue providing financial oversight of Freeman’s local on behalf of SEIU.
Apparently, when SEIU officials learned in 2001 about the corruption, Medina along with Andy Stern, Mary Kay Henry and Steve Trossman engineered a cover-up that allowed Freeman to continue stealing from SEIU members for another seven years.
Now that he’s facing possible jail time, Freeman may be “naming names”… including Medina’s.
It’s possible that Woodruff was also wrapped up in the Freeman corruption scandal. Others speculate that Woodruff may be leaving because “Change to Win,” which he’s helped lead since 2005, has failed badly to deliver on its many promises. In fact, SEIU itself has failed horribly as it seesaws from one organizing pipe dream to the next nutty top-down scheme… which appear to make sense only in SEIU officials’ imaginations.
And, of course, there’s still that other explanation for possible resignations: perhaps Andy found two empty seats on the board of directors at SIGA Technologies!
