What happens when workers at a California hospital vote down
SEIU’s candidate for an elected union position? Check out this story from the
Adult Medicine Department at Kaiser Walnut Creek Medical Center in Northern
California.
Recently, the department’s workers voted down SEIU’s candidate
for Shop Steward by a vote of 40 to 3. Why? Apparently, he doesn’t fight for his co-workers and is super untrustworthy.
In fact, several
years before the trusteeship, workers caught him trying to permanently change
the department’s seniority rules so he could be first in line for
additional overtime hours. When workers uncovered the scheme, they used the
union’s then-democratic procedures to remove him as a Shop Steward by a nearly unanimous
vote. As one worker put it: “This guy is in it only for himself. He doesn’t fight
for the members. It’s all about him.”
Soon after SEIU imposed its trusteeship in California, SEIU
officials hooked up with the demoted steward, John Cuddihy, and began paying him to campaign for SEIU (check out his SEIU pay on top of his regular job). Cuddihy quickly became best buddies with SEIU’s trustees. That’s why SEIU
wants him to be a Shop Steward, which SEIU hopes will be a
stepping stone towards putting him on Dave Regan’s Executive Board.
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| SEIU Trustees' Payments to Cuddihy in 2009 |
So what happened when workers voted Cuddihy down in the recent
election? SEIU officials decided that if
they couldn’t get him elected in his own department, they would hold an unannounced
election for Cuddihy in a totally different department (Pediatrics) where Cuddihy doesn’t even
work... even though this violates the union’s so-called
rules.
As you can imagine, workers in the Adult Medicine Department
were a bit surprised when SEIU announced that Cuddihy had become their
Shop Steward. What happened to their earlier vote to reject Cuddihy by a 40 to 3 margin? Apparently, SEIU officials simply tossed it into the garbage.
Ironically, the rigged vote
at Kaiser Walnut Creek Medical Center took place as Dave Regan announced with
great fanfare that he had convened a special “Representational Excellence
Committee” to improve SEIU-UHW’s system of shop stewards and worksite
representation. What a joke.
The recent rigged vote at Kaiser Walnut Creek is just the latest in a long line of such votes, including this famous contract ratification vote where SEIU deployed a 300 lb guard to block homecare workers from getting into the polling place. Check out the video.
