Kaiser Permanente has blocked SEIU-UHW from participating
in upcoming bargaining with its “partnership” unions after SEIU-UHW’s Dave
Regan filed a statewide ballot initiative targeting Kaiser, according to an
internal memo issued by Kaiser executives last week. A copy of the memo along
with the ballot initiative is below.
What’s going on?
Here’s what Tasty has learned so
far.
Apparently, Regan has become
increasingly marginalized by Kaiser’s execs and by the other “partnership”
unions in the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (the “Coalition”). The
Coalition, which is made up of 28 unions representing 100,000 Kaiser workers across
the US, bargains a national contract with Kaiser once every three years.
In late 2015, Regan sued
Greg Adams, a top Kaiser exec, who served on the board of the California
Hospital Association (CHA) and was caught up in Regan’s failed ballot
initiative targeting the CHA.
Then, in August of 2017, Regan
reportedly pissed
off the other partnership unions when he tried to change the Coalition’s bylaws
in order to give SEIU-UHW virtually all of the power to call the shots during
the next round of national bargaining, which begins early next year. Other
unions, including AFSCME, rejected Regan’s proposal, which sparked a
shouting match during a three-day meeting of the partnership unions in Portland,
Oregon.
Apparently, Regan has burnt turf
not only with AFSCME but with SEIU locals in both Oregon and Colorado, including
his erstwhile buddy Meg Niemi.
And another source reports that
Regan no longer has the support of Hal
Ruddick, the Executive Director of the Coalition. Ruddick is a former hack
staffer at SEIU-UHW whom Regan got appointed to his position at the Coalition. Later,
Regan reportedly attempted to have Ruddick fired, but was unsuccessful -- which
hasn’t made Regan super popular at the Coalition’s offices.
After failing to convince the
partnership unions to give him more power, Regan asked Kaiser’s execs for their
help. In an internal memo issued last week, Kaiser's Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Chuck Columbus wrote:
…for months now, SEIU-UHW’s leadership has insisted in private meetings that Kaiser Permanente management negotiate with SEIU-UHW as the sole representative of the Coalition in upcoming National Bargaining. In these meetings, SEIU-UHW’s leadership has threatened that if we refused their demands, they would put an initiative on the California ballot that would adversely affect Kaiser Permanente… We said no to SEIU-UHW leadership’s demand.
Meanwhile, Kaiser reportedly has told
Regan it plans to propose cuts to SEIU-UHW members’ wage structure in Northern
California.
Currently, SEIU-UHW’s members from
San Francisco to Sacramento to Fresno are covered by a single pay scale.
Kaiser’s execs told Regan they will propose cuts such that future SEIU-UHW hires
in Sacramento would earn 10% less than those in the San Francisco Bay Area,
while new hires in Fresno would earn 20% less than the Bay Area.
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| Regan and Kaiser Senior VP Chuck Columbus |
Regan, seeing takeaways on the
table and little power inside the CKPU or with Kaiser’s execs, decided to turn
to his old stand-by tactic of a statewide ballot initiative. On November 16, he
filed an initiative with the California Attorney General (“Accountability in
Managed Health Insurance Act”) which would prohibit Kaiser from raising its monthly
insurance rates until Kaiser’s capital reserves drop below a certain level.
Kaiser’s response?
Kaiser removed SEIU-UHW from next
year’s partnership bargaining, saying Regan’s ballot initiative violates the
terms of its partnership deal with SEIU-UHW. Kaiser’s memo says:
In sponsoring this destructive initiative, SEIU-UHW leadership has violated both the spirit and the actual terms of the agreements that set up our valued Labor Management Partnership. Accordingly, we today have informed the leadership of SEIU-UHW that we are withdrawing certain privileges of Partnership from SEIU-UHW due to the union’s outrageous conduct. Among the privileges we have withdrawn is participation of SEIU-UHW in 2018 National Bargaining.
Kaiser’s memo then takes a shot at
Regan and his ballot initiatives:
Over the past few years, SEIU-UHW leadership has used the initiative process to force concessions from various employers. All these efforts have failed. If SEIU-UHW goes ahead with spending the millions of dollars it will take to get this initiative on the ballot, we are confident that once California voters understand the impact on Kaiser Permanente, they will join us to defeat this measure in November.
These developments are quite a
turnaround for Regan, who has prided himself on being Kaiser execs’ lapdog.
For example, in 2012 Regan convinced
the partnership unions to adopt an invasive corporate
wellness program that allows Kaiser to peer inside workers’ bodies and
collect blood samples and other “biometric data” so Kaiser can monitor workers’
weight, blood pressure, smoking rate, cholesterol levels and personal lives.
In another episode, Regan directed
SEIU-UHW staffers (including Greg
Maron and Jared Mayhugh) to work as strikebreakers
alongside Kaiser managers to stop SEIU-UHW members from joining strikes by NUHW
and the California Nurses Association (CNA) at Kaiser.
And then there are Regan’s famous “wellness
walks.” Instead of picket signs and picket lines, Regan gave purple
pedometers to SEIU-UHW members and told them to lose weight so as to reduce
Kaiser’s health insurance costs.
Regan quickly became known as Kaiser’s
Richard Simmons.
If Regan has been such a loyal
lapdog to Kaiser’s execs, why is Kaiser now seeking takeaways from Regan?
One observer put it this way: “Because
they can.” This observer points to Regan’s failure to build a rank-and-file
organization inside Kaiser facilities that can fight takeaways.
A similar explanation comes from RoseAnn
DeMoro, the Executive Director of the CNA. At a rally several years ago
when Regan was in the throes of his lovefest with California hospital execs, DeMoro
predicted that the execs would eventually kick Regan to the curb. “These
corporations will treat Regan like they do every class traitor. They’ll toss
him aside once he’s no longer useful to them.” (Tasty is paraphrasing DeMoro
here.)
The fact that Kaiser is coming
after Regan for wage cuts in Northern California is quite a stunning historical
reversal.
In the late 1980s, Kaiser
unilaterally imposed a similar multi-tiered wage structure across Northern
California, which Kaiser workers tried to overturn by waging a seven-week
strike. Afterwards, Sal Rosselli was elected president of the union and, during
the next 15 years, he and his team dramatically expanded and strengthened the
union and successfully eliminated Kaiser’s multi-tiered wage structure in 2005.
In fact, Rosselli went even further, negotiating improvements to Southern
California Kaiser workers’ wage structures to help close the wage gap with
their Northern California co-workers. (Kaiser’s Southern California workers
earn substantially less than those in Northern California.)
Since parachuting into California
in 2009, Regan has taken no steps whatsoever to address the lower wage rates
paid to SEIU-UHW members at Kaiser’s Southern California facilities. And he’s
now facing a push by Kaiser execs to re-impose the multi-tiered wage structure
that Rosselli successfully eliminated back in 2005.
In other words, Regan
is poised to possibly deliver a massive failure to tens of thousands of Kaiser
workers.
What’s next?
 |
| Hal Ruddick, the Coalition's Executive Director |
The Coalition unions have been conducting
surveys and electing bargaining committees to participate in national
bargaining, which begins early next year. SEIU-UHW, of course, will be on the
sidelines. It won’t bargain with Kaiser until 2019, when its “local union
agreement” with Kaiser expires on September 30, 2019.
As far as Regan’s ballot initiative,
once it’s cleared by the California Attorney General, SEIU-UHW will need to
spend millions of dollars to collect enough voter signatures to qualify the measure
for the November 2018 ballot.
By the way, Regan also has filed at
least nine other ballot initiatives for the November 2018 ballot, which target Stanford Health Care, DaVita Inc., Watsonville
Community Hospital, and Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. Regan’s increasing reliance on ballot
initiatives raises an interesting question about whether his corporate targets will
band together to try to block his use of ballot initiatives as bargaining
leverage, as an earlier
piece of California legislation appeared to do.
What do Kaiser workers say about
Regan’s ballot initiative?
According to Tasty’s contacts,
workers had no idea their union’s president had even filed a ballot initiative
until Kaiser officials sent them the memo below.
It’s another symptom of Regan’s so-called
“innovative 21st century unionism,” which relies on hiring lawyers
to file ballot initiatives rather than organizing workers to build workplace
power.
