Thursday, January 3, 2013

Breaking News: NUHW Affiliates with California Nurses Association



(Note: More press links have been added below.)

Check this out! NUHW announced it's affiliating with the California Nurses Association

Earlier today, the two unions held a press conference in Oakland, California where NUHW announced that its members voted overwhelmingly to approve the affiliation. Tasty has posted links to press coverage below. 

Sources say the move is a game-changer... and that the Purple Palace is panicked. Here's what happened.

According to Tasty's sources, the California Nurses Association has become increasingly outraged at the unprecedented concessions that SEIU's Dave Regan has been negotiating with California’s hospital corporations. These concessions -- including eliminating the defined-benefit pensions for 20,000 SEIU-UHW members and slashing workers' health benefits -- have emboldened the companies to demand the same cuts from CNA's members, who happen to work in the same hospitals across California.

Recently, Regan even teamed up with the industry’s chamber of commerce -- the California Hospital Association -- to try to reverse California’s landmark safe-staffing law for hospitals.

As workers' wages and benefits swirl down the toilet with each successive flush by Dave Regan, the CNA decided it needed to join forces with an aggressive union like NUHW. That's the goal of the affiliation -- to create a united front against the multi-billion-dollar hospital corporations and their company union, SEIU.

This shakeout among California's unions comes as no surprise to observers. In fact, Duane Dauner, CEO of the California Hospital Association, said as much in a recent interview... when he named the hospital industry's "friends and foes." The CNA and NUHW are "in one camp," says Dauner, because "they draw a line in the sand" against healthcare corporations. (Wait a sec, isn't that what unions are supposed to do? Hmm... how else can workers possibly win anything if they don't "draw a line in the sand"?)

Meanwhile, Dauner says SEIU-UHW and Dave Regan "are in another camp." Apparently, that's the camp that gladly hands over workers' hard-earned wages and benefits to super-profitable corporations like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health. No wonder Duane is BFFs with Dave Regan.

Tasty sends his congrats to the members of the CNA and NUHW!