NUHW Celebrates a Decade

This month marks ten years since the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) was founded on the heels of a disastrous trusteeship imposed by SEIU’s Purple Palace in Washington DC.

Since 2009, NUHW has grown to more than 15,000 members. It has built a democratic and member-controlled union while waging militant fights and repeated strikes against healthcare corporations like Kaiser Permanente... winning it a reputation as a "giant killer." Last year saw NUHW’s expansion to Hawaii.

Meanwhile, SEIU-UHW has pursued a very different strategy: becoming the boss’s best friend.

SEIU-UHW has given up massive concessions to California’s biggest healthcare corporations. It’s given away workers’ defined-benefit pension plans, eliminated workers’ fully employer-paid health insurance, and allowed corporations like Dignity Health to impose wage freezes on 15,000 workers.

Forget strikes, says SEIU-UHW’s Trustee/President Dave Regan. In fact, SEIU-UHW has carried out only one or two strikes during an entire decade. SEIU-UHW even teamed up with Kaiser's execs to organize against workers' strikes.

What, then, is SEIU-UHW’s strategy for winning some measure of justice from the giant corporations that dominate the US economy?

During a TV interview with Los Angeles’s KNBC TV station, Regan famously admitted that SEIU-UHW is not interested in fighting employers on behalf of workers and their patients. The era of "adversarial relationships" between workers and corporations is dead, says Regan.

Instead, SEIU-UHW pursues “collaboration” and “teamwork” with corporations... as memorialized in Regan’s backroom deals with executives that force workers into cheap, pre-negotiated labor contracts. Check out this quick excerpt from his TV interview.

At first, corporations were all too happy to accept Regan’s boot-licking approach.

Later, when Regan’s usefulness had been exhausted, the execs kicked him to the curb like a two-bit punk. Gone were the days when Diamond Dave could prance around hotel suites with pinstriped execs.

Since then, Regan -- his ego on crutches -- has latched onto ballot initiatives, rather than worker organization, as his latest lame strategy for “winning for workers.”

Congrats to NUHW for all of its accomplishments and its perseverance during a time of ascendant corporations and intense need for worker organizing!

It’s been quite a decade, with more battles ahead.

For coverage of NUHW’s 10-year anniversary, see Steve Early’s article published earlier this week, with a few excerpts pasted below. (Steve Early, “A Trusteeship Diaspora: How SEIU’s-Inflicted Loss Became Labor’s Gain,” Beyond Chron, January 29, 2019.)

[Former SEIU President Andy] Stern’s military style take-over of UHW greatly tarnished SEIU’s reputation for being “progressive.”  It generated bad press for the entire labor movement because the trusteeship lent credence to anti-union propaganda about “union bosses” running roughshod over the rank-and-file and misusing their dues money…

Post-trusteeship UHW quickly lost the respect of other California unions and their political friends in Sacramento. In recent years, the Stern-installed leadership of UHW helped fracture a multi-union bargaining coalition at Kaiser Permanente, wasted more than $30 million on failed ballot initiatives, and lost a third of its membership….

Rosselli and other UHW members succeeded in building a new statewide healthcare workers organization that is independent of any national labor union… NUHW now has a statewide membership of 15,000 in about forty bargaining units. The union is known for its militant contract campaigns and involvement in progressive causes like Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and the on-going fight for single-payer healthcare.

…full-time staffers once employed by UHW have gone to work for other unions, central labor councils, labor reform struggles, community organizations, and political campaigns across the country. This new diaspora—from a once exemplary SEIU local– is helping thousands of workers win high profile organizing campaigns and strikes, like the recent LA teachers walk-out, and rejuvenate the unions involved.