More Workers Seek to Dump SEIU-UHW

Workers at a Southern California hospital have formally requested an NLRB election so they can dump SEIU-UHW and join NUHW, according to workers and NLRB records.

The request -- reportedly signed by 80% of the workers at 140-bed Garden Grove Hospital & Medical Center -- comes after SEIU-UHW has been completely “MIA” at the hospital, according to workers.

Workers say SEIU-UHW provides zero support to its members… and fails to enforce even basic workplace standards. And under Dave Regan's regime, workers have had a wage freeze for more than 4 years.

Soon after workers submitted their recent request for an NLRB election, Regan instructed the union's attorneys to stall the vote by filing bogus charges with the NLRB. 

Regan's stalling strategy comes after two earlier, but unsuccessful, attempts to prevent the workers from even filing their request with the NLRB... which Tasty will describe in another post.

Readers may recall Garden Grove Hospital as the site where SEIU-UHW staffer Liz Castillo became a YouTube star (more than 85,000 views and counting) after she was captured on film in the hospital's cafeteria while insulting workers and then physically attacking one person.

Chaos Erupts as SEIU-UHW Staffer Suffers Severe Case of Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Tasty hears that SEIU-UHW’s recent Executive Board meeting ended in chaos after board members caught SEIU-UHW officials in a multi-million dollar lie.

Apparently, Dave Regan has been hounding Executive Board members to sign up their co-workers to make monthly financial contributions to SEIU-UHW’s COPE fund. These contributions -- which are used for politics -- are voluntary.

In response to Regan's persistent pressure, board members have been saying: ‘We’re already paying as much as $134 a month in union dues. Why do we need to make more contributions to SEIU-UHW? Can’t you use some of our dues money for politics?’

SEIU-UHW officials -- doing their best Pinocchio imitation -- have blatantly lied to board members by telling them that the law prohibits the union from using workers’ dues money for political purposes.

Great strategy, right? Lying to your own Board of Directors.

At SEIU-UHW’s December board meeting, Executive Board members discovered various line items in Regan’s 2015 budget that clearly demonstrate that Regan is steering millions of workers’ dues dollars into politics. This is nothing new. Tasty last month reported that Regan is attempting to quadruple the amount of money that's taken from union members' dues and funneled into a Political Action Committee (PAC) that Regan recently set up with his pal, Duane Dauner, the CEO of the California Hospital Association.

SEIU-UHW's Greg Moron

Once the truth was out of the bag at SEIU-UHW’s recent board meeting, things went from worse to worser, as George Bush would say.

SEIU-UHW staffer Greg Maron -- affectionately known by workers as "Mr. Moron" -- was forced to admit that he’d been lying to board members for months. 

And true to his well-earned reputation, Mr. Moron stood in front of the union's board and began digging himself into a deep, muddy hole:

I didn't tell you the truth because this is complicated stuff. Let me try to dumb it down for you…

At this point, the room literally erupted, according to observers.

Nothing better than having an overpaid punk of a union staffer (Moron has pocketed as much as $140,000 a year under Regan) stand up in front of the union's elected board of directors and tell them they’re "STUPID."

Way to go, Greg!

NUHW Wins Two More Elections

During the past three weeks, workers at two more non-union California hospitals voted to join NUHW… and by overwhelming margins!

By Tasty’s count, NUHW has won six elections this year and added approximately 1,300 members.

Two weeks ago, a unit of 125 service and technical workers at Petaluma Valley Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area voted to join NUHW. Here's the final tally of the NLRB election:

NUHW: 78

No Union: 13

And here's the tally from an NLRB election in late November at St. Joseph Hospital Eureka for a unit of 85 technical workers:

NUHW: 51

No Union: 13

In April, a separate unit of 270 workers at St. Joseph Hospital Eureka voted by a 2-to-1 margin to join NUHW.

Congrats to NUHW’s newest members!

Myriam's Charm Offensive Gets Rave Reviews

SEIU-UHW's Myriam Escamilla

Myriam Escamilla has continued to wage a specialized ‘charm offensive’ ever since Dave Regan placed her atop the union's Hospital Division earlier this year, says an SEIU-UHW staff person.

Back in June, Tasty relayed reports from UHW staffers who described how co-workers had tagged Escamilla with nicknames like "Attila the Hun" and “El Diablo” after she used tantrums and tirades to bully staff. 

In recent days, an SEIU-UHW staffer sent the following note in response to the title of Tasty’s recent post: “SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan: "I'm Kaiser's bitch” (Part 2).”

What about Myriam Escamilla? She's the New Head Bitch in charge of the Hospital Division.

She has caused such divisions in UHW staff by terminating and harassing staff. Many staff are out on stress or in line for termination. In 2012 we had a staff person who shot and killed himself due to the pressure of Eric Kizziee, Hal Ruddick, Greg Pullman and Dave Regan. The things that were never made known was the phone message that he left regarding why he was ending his life due to the people listed above. He left this on all their phone lines including Cedars-Sinai [Medical Center].

Eric Kizziee has done so many negative things that now he kisses Myriam's, Greg Pullman’s and Dave Regan’s ass in order to keep his job.

Lots of Hospital Division facilities are looking to decertify UHW because there's no representation anymore. Myriam claims she’s so knowledgeable, but she can't even answer basic questions from staff. And she can't ask Greg Maron, because he has no knowledge of representation.

Sounds like a great place to work, right?

That's not all. 

In addition to abusing her staff, Escamilla is super adept at screwing workers.

In 2012, she signed a secret deal with a nursing home company called Brius Healthcare that slashed workers' wages, benefits, hours, and working conditions. When workers confronted her, Escamilla denied that she had made any back-room deals with their Boss… until workers presented a copy of the secret deal with her signature on it!

Now, SEIU-UHW’s own staffers are getting a chance to enjoy Myriam’s abundant talents!

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan: "I'm Kaiser's bitch” (Part 2)

Dave Regan's latest act of pimpery shows us he'll pretty much do anything that Kaiser Permanente’s execs ask of him.

Here's what happened:

Kaiser's execs are under fire for the HMO's deepening mental health crisis.

In September, Kaiser agreed to pay a $4 million government fine for short-staffing its mental health clinics and forcing patients to wait weeks and even months for basic care. Among multiple violations of patient care laws, Kaiser admitted to maintaining a parallel set of paper waiting lists that hid patients' massive appointment wait times -- just like at the VA hospitals. Today, Kaiser is operating under a government-issued "Cease and Desist Order."

Also in September, a U.S. Congressperson held a community forum where Kaiser was blasted by patients for its mental health failures. One of the forum's sponsors was an elected county official whose husband, a Kaiser patient, tragically took his own life while waiting 42 days for a mental health appointment despite his serious condition.

In October, Kaiser’s patients filed a fourth class action lawsuit against the giant HMO, this one alleging that Kaiser is illegally dumping patients with severe mental illness onto counties. Three other lawsuits allege that Kaiser’s appointment delays are directly connected to suicides by Kaiser patients.

And just two weeks ago, Kaiser's 2,500 mental health clinicians -- who are members of NUHW -- announced they’ve authorized a statewide strike to protest Kaiser's short staffing and its undertreatment of patients.

It's no surprise, then, that Kaiser's PR officials are sweating bullets as they stare at their computer screens and try to dream up ways to escape this PR nightmare. Then one day, however, one of them had a brilliant idea. “Let's call Dave Regan. He'll say anything."

That's how Dave Regan ended up being quoted, alongside Kaiser's chief PR hack John Nelson, in a Modern Healthcare article published last week (see below). In the article, Regan announces that there's no staffing problem at Kaiser's mental health clinics! Way to go, Dave!

Regan, of course, forgot to tell the journalist that his union doesn't represent any of Kaiser's mental health workers. Whoops!

Here's an excerpt from a comment below the Modern Healthcare article:

Neither Regan nor Nelson are as qualified to comment on the limitations of Kaiser’s mental health services as its clinicians who must wait as long as three months to see their patients for treatment appointments.

Question: What sort of labor leader shills for management? Answer: the Dave Regan sort. Regan does not represent Kaiser's mental health professionals. In 2010, fed up with his betrayal of our benefits, I and 2500 of my colleagues voted overwhelmingly to quit SEIU and join NUHW. Compromised and unqualified, he has no standing to speak comment on the deficiencies plaguing Kaiser mental health.

And here's a cartoon created in response to Regan's quote:

Dave Regan:  "for sale to the highest bidder" ...and willing to throw patients under the bus to advance his personal interest.

Modern Healthcare

Kaiser mental-health staffing under fire again

By Adam Rubenfire   December 4, 2014

Members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers are accusing healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente of understaffing its mental-health services, and they're threatening to strike if their issues aren't resolved. Kaiser has responded that patients with urgent needs can be seen immediately, and it accuses the union in turn of sullying the system's reputation for its own organizing purposes.

The NUHW, founded in 2009 when it split from the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, says patients are waiting too long for appointments because there aren't enough mental-health staffers to meet demand. NUHW members, who represent about 2,500 of Kaiser's mental-health workers in California, voted in November to strike if the system doesn't make improvements.

But Dave Regan, president of the SEIU-UHW, which represents 45,000 Kaiser employees across the state, dismissed NUHW's concerns, saying that the staffing problem “was a limited one and is completely solved.”

However, this isn't the first time Kaiser has been accused of poor psychiatric care. The provider was fined $4 million by the California Department of Managed Health Care in 2013 for failing to provide timely care for its mental-health patients.

The agency also said that Kaiser's marketing materials detailing its mental-health services were confusing and unlawful, including an FAQ sheet informing patients that long-term psychotherapy was unavailable at Kaiser facilities, and would not be covered by Kaiser insurance. This statement and others were found to be in violation of the state's mental-health parity law, which requires mental illnesses to be covered and treated in the same manner as physical illnesses.

Kaiser contested the penalty but ultimately agreed to pay it... (full article)