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| SEIU's Mary Kay Henry and AFSCME's Lee Saunders |
Dave Regan’s ballot
initiative against Kaiser Permanente prompted a secret confab this
week in Washington DC, say Tasty’s sources.
On Monday, Kaiser
Permanente CEO Bernard Tyson reportedly met with top officials from the
partnership unions, known as the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
Who was in the room?
The presidents of many
of the international unions that participate in the partnership including the AFT’s
Randi Weingarten and AFSCME’s Lee Saunders.
SEIU’s Mary
Kay Henry reportedly attended a pre-meeting, but then ducked out of the
room before the Kaiser CEO showed up. It looks like Mary
Kay Henry didn’t want to face Tyson, who says SEIU-UHW’s ballot
initiative would jeopardize the future financial stability of the HMO.
Meanwhile, Kaiser took
another shot at Regan this week.
The HMO mailed a
two-page letter to the homes of tens of thousands of SEIU-UHW members with the
heading, “We need your help securing our future together: Help stop an attack
on Kaiser Permanente.” The letter calls on the union’s members to contact Regan
and tell him to “stop putting our future at risk.” Tasty guesses this is one piece
of what’ll likely be a campaign to turn the hearts and minds of SEIU-UHW
members against their erratic president.
Regan, after parachuting
into California into 2009, surgically attached himself to the hips of Kaiser’s
execs… even working with them to try to break strikes by NUHW and the California
Nurses Association. So it’s not hard to understand why Regan’s recent attack
on Kaiser -- which caused Kaiser execs to
block SEIU-UHW from participating in upcoming national bargaining -- is
causing SEIU-UHW’s members to scratch their heads.
Here’s a copy of the
letter Kaiser sent to SEIU-UHW members:
