SEIU Officials: “Help us during Kaiser election… before we lay you off”

SEIU is parachuting more organizers into California for the election at Kaiser Permanente… even though this will be the last campaign for many of them.

According to Tasty’s sources, SEIU officials will soon be laying off a large number of its staff due to SEIU’s declining membership and its $42 million in red ink, which were detailed in SEIU’s recent filing with the U.S. Department of Labor.  

The Purple Palace has already asked staff to take voluntary retirements and will soon begin implementing the layoffs, say Tasty’s sources.

SEIU's Dennis Rivera

The layoffs are coming despite the fact that the Purple Palace lavishes fat salaries upon its top officials. Check out the case of Dennis Rivera, a “Senior Policy Adviser” to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.  Rivera was formerly the president of SEIU 1199 New York. 

In 2012, SEIU paid Rivera a salary of $275,764... and then tossed him another $20,000 in payments via a separate “consulting” contract with SEIU. (See excerpt below,)

Hmm… why is SEIU’s Henry giving $20K side gigs to one of her top advisers who's already a full-time SEIU employee? Does Dennis only begin his consulting work once he clocks out at the end of the day?

Interestingly, SEIU’s $20K in consulting fees were delivered to the island of Culebra, located off of Puerto Rica, where Rivera reportedly owns “a mansion” and farm in a setting that's described as a "tropical paradise." Here are excerpts from SEIU’s LM-2 detailing SEIU's payments to Rivera during 2012. Click on image below to enlarge it.

Source: SEIU's DOL Form lm-2 for 2012

The layoffs of SEIU staffers are only the latest in a string of conflicts between SEIU and its staff. 

Last September, SEIU’s clerical staff picketed the Purple Palace after Mary Kay Henry demanded a three-year wage freeze from the staff during contract negotiations. And here’s an older column written by the former president of the Union of Union Representatives (UUR), one of SEIU’s staff unions, in which he sharply criticizes SEIU's top officials. And back in 2008, the UUR even passed a formal resolution urging its members to refuse to participate in SEIU's trusteeship of SEIU-UHW.