This month marks the tenth anniversary of some of the headline-grabbing events that led up to SEIU's disastrous trusteeship of SEIU-UHW.
Ten years ago, SEIU-UHW --
then led by president Sal Rosselli
-- was one of the most successful healthcare unions in the nation. Labor
journalist Steve Early called SEIU’s
takeover of SEIU-UHW “the mother of all trusteeships.” Unfortunately, it gave birth to a
Frankenstein-like child headed by Dave
Regan, who quickly drove the once-powerful union into the ground.
So what
happened ten years ago?
During
August 2008, a reporter named Paul Pringle
published eight articles in the Los
Angeles Times detailing a massive corruption scandal perpetrated by Tyrone Freeman, one of Andy Stern’s closest allies.
Freeman’s
corruption was stunning. It ranged from union-funded jaunts
to Hawaii with his personal assistant, $175 glasses of cognac and cigars at
an exclusive
cigar club frequented by Los Angeles movie stars, no-show
jobs for relatives, and kickbacks
from corporations in exchange for deals that sold out low-wage healthcare
workers.
During the months
leading up to August 2008, Freeman had served as Andy Stern’s attack dog in
Stern’s campaign to “implode”
SEIU-UHW. A boatload of Stern’s staffers also worked on the campaign, such as Stephen Lerner, Dave Regan, Bill Ragen, Tom DeBruin, Josie
Mooney, Debbie
Schneider, Steve Trossman and Denise Poloyac.
 |
| Andy Stern |
Earlier in
the summer of 2008, Freeman was riding high after Stern initiated a maneuver
to transfer 65,000 union members out of Rosselli’s SEIU-UHW and put them in
Freeman’s union… without a democratic vote by the workers.
Following the
transfer, Freeman would have led one of SEIU’s largest local unions… and he then
would have delivered all of his union’s votes to Stern at SEIU’s conventions
where Stern sought reelection as the international union’s president.
But in
August 2008, the curtains were finally pulled back on Freeman’s years-long
corruption scandal and he plummeted to earth like a flaming meteor.
Stern, angry
at the loss of his loyal ally, announced on August 25, 2008 that SEIU was
launching trusteeship hearings against Rosselli’s union. During the preceding years,
SEIU-UHW’s members had caught Stern and his DC-based staffers making backroom
deals with healthcare corporations that sold out workers and patients, and
violated democratic principles.
In 2010,
Stern resigned as the President of SEIU after launching yet another disastrous
attack, this time against UNITE HERE.
Freeman, in turn, ended up in federal prison. "May God have mercy on
me," said
Freeman at the time of his sentencing. "I am accountable for these bad
decisions."
Meanwhile, Rosselli
and his crew of rank-and-file leaders launched the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) as a militant,
member-led, democratic alternative to SEIU.
Ten years later, this history stands sharper in our collective memory.
Here’s a
link to the
series of articles in the Los Angeles
Times from August 2008.
