Last week,
Dave Regan was declared the winner of SEIU-UHW’s internal election after
winning the votes of just 3% of SEIU-UHW’s members.
Of the union’s 86,512
members, Regan received votes from 2,916 members while his two challengers together collected about 1,000 votes.
Here are the
vote totals for the election, according to SEIU-UHW’s
website:
Total
eligible voters: 86,512
Dave Regan: 2,916
votes
Niko
Anagnostopoulos: 511 votes
Cartina
Price: 469 votes
Regan’s vote
totals dropped from approximately 8,000 in 2014 to just 2,916 in 2017. At the
same time, Regan’s challengers collected about the same numbers of votes in
2017 as they did in 2014 – approximately 1,000.
In the
run-up to the election, Regan campaigned around California by attending monthly
steward council meetings at multiple hospitals. Regan’s efforts may have been
prompted by the support shown for one of his challengers, a rank-and-file Kaiser Permanente member named Niko
Anagnostopoulos who won the unanimous backing of the steward council at his hospital,
which is one of Kaiser’ largest.
During his
speeches to steward council meetings at Kaiser hospitals, Regan reportedly said
he wants to negotiate a 10-year labor contract with Kaiser during the
partnership unions’ negotiations next year. In California’s hospital industry, union
contracts are typically two to four years in duration.
Interestingly,
at St. Francis Medical Center in Los
Angeles, Regan’s slate of candidates (the so-called “Healthcare Justice” slate)
lost elections for seats on SEIU-UHW’s Executive Board. Independent candidates
beat Regan’s slate by more than a two-to-one margin. The 384-bed hospital is
part of Verity Health System,
formerly the Daughters of Charity Health
System.
In 2015,
Regan negotiated massive
cuts for workers at St. Francis and other Verity hospitals, including
freezing workers’ wage scales, eliminating benefits for many part-time workers,
and multiple other cuts. Next, Regan used a system of ramrod
membership votes to ratify his give-backs to the four-profit company. SEIU-UHW members called
Regan’s contract “the
worst contracting or history.”
 |
| Facebook post by one of Regan's challengers following the vote count. |
What’s next?
It’s unclear
whether Regan intends to serve out the full three years of his next term of
office.
In December
2015, Regan told
a meeting of the SEIU-UHW’s Executive Board he would not run for re-election,
according to board members who attended the meeting. Regan said he was backing
the director of SEIU-UHW’s Kaiser Division, Chokri Bensaid, to succeed him.
As the
election approached, however, Regan suddenly
declared his candidacy.
Some observers speculate he ran for reelection
because he was concerned that Bensaid could not win a contested election.
According to these observers, it’s possible Regan will resign his position
during his next term of office so that Bensaid can be appointed by the union’s
Executive Board as his successor.
Stay tuned.
