NUHW Hits Kaiser with Strike

The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) is taking on Kaiser Permanente again.

Not through ballot initiatives, which is Dave Regan’s preferred approach.

But through strikes… which SEIU-UHW hasn’t attempted against any healthcare company in years.

Last month, 4,000 NUHW members conducted a weeklong strike against dozens of Kaiser facilities across California. The strikers included Psychologists, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists, Psychiatric RNs, Medical Social Workers, Addiction Medicine Specialists, Dietitians, Health Educators, and others.

It was the largest strike by mental health therapists in the nation's history, according to NUHW.

What do the strikers want? They're demanding more staff.

Kaiser’s chronic understaffing of its mental health clinics forces patients with depression, bipolar disorder, and other conditions to wait two months or more for appointments.

Strikers were joined by former Congressman Patrick Kennedy -- the author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act and a national leader of mental health reform efforts -- who flew across the US to join them on the picket line.

RNs from the California Nurses Association and members of the Stationary Engineers Local 39 also joined picket lines across the state.

According to NUHW, the strike produced more than 1,000 press stories.

And one thousand patients reported their stories of Kaiser’s delayed care -- including suicides and other tragic outcomes -- to the union’s “Kaiser Don’t Deny” website, according to NUHW.

This isn’t the first time that NUHW has taken on Kaiser.

Several years ago, NUHW hit Kaiser with a series of statewide strikes and successfully got the state to fine the giant HMO $4 million for illegally delaying their patients’ mental health appointments. NUHW documented more than a dozen suicides connected to Kaiser's delayed care.

Check out this three-minute TV news story about the strike and Kaiser’s understaffed mental health clinics.

Union Heads Meet with Kaiser CEO in D.C. over Dave Regan’s Ballot Initiative

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:

   Kaiser Permanente's Letter to Workers regarding SEIU-UHW's California Ballot Initiative: 01-23-2018 by tastysternburger on Scribd

Dave Regan’s Ballot Initiative Knocks SEIU-UHW out of Kaiser Partnership

Here’s some interesting news from California.

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.

Regan and Kaiser Senior VP Chuck Columbus

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.

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 21^st century unionism,” which relies on hiring lawyers to file ballot initiatives rather than organizing workers to build workplace power.

   Kaiser Permanente's memo to employees on SEIU-UHW's Ballot Initiative:12.12.2017 by tastysternburger on Scribd

   SEIU-UHW's Ballot Initiative against Kaiser Permanente in California by tastysternburger on Scribd

News from Kaiser Partnership Bargaining

Here’s the latest.

Sources report that Kaiser Permanente is no longer demanding that the partnership unions give up their members' defined-benefit pension plan and replace it with a 401(k) plan.

However, sources say the partnership unions will likely accept additional cuts to employees’ health benefits. These cuts would come on top of the reductions implemented in 2012, when the partnership unions agreed to sharply reduce workers' retiree health benefits. Those cuts produced a $1.9 billion windfall for Kaiser's balance sheet, according to the HMO’s financial statements.

What caused Kaiser to back down from its demand for pension cuts (...at least for the time being)?

Earlier today, NUHW sent out an e-mail pointing to the multi-year battle its members have waged against all three of Kaiser’s cuts (i.e., to workers' pension plan, active employee health benefits, and retiree health benefits). 

For four years, NUHW’s members have refused to accept any of the cuts and have conducted multiple statewide strikes to fight them. Meanwhile, the partnership unions have waged no fight whatsoever against the proposed reductions, and SEIU-UHW even worked hand-in-glove with Kaiser management to try to defeat NUHW members' strikes.

In January of this year, while NUHW’s members were in the middle of a week-long statewide strike against Kaiser, the California Nurses Association settled its contract negotiations with Kaiser by accepting two of Kaiser’s cuts (that is, cuts to active employees' and retirees' health benefits). The CNA also created a committee to study possible future changes to their members’ pension plan.

Here's the e-mail from NUHW: 

NUHW just saved the pensions of more than 100,000 Kaiser Permanente employees. 

For four years, Kaiser's goal has been to eliminate the pension plan for its workforce and replace it with a 401k. NUHW has fought this cut for three years and our strength and dedication has paid off. 

After multiple NUHW strikes in 2012 and 2013, Kaiser modified its proposal from elimination of the pension for all employees to implementation of a two-tier plan that would have deprived future employees of the pension. In January, NUHW continued its fight with a one-week statewide strike in part to reject the two-tier plan. CNA was able to leverage our strike to resist the pension cut in the contract they settled in January, and now the Labor–Management Partnership unions are benefiting from our fight as well. 

Kaiser has pulled its two-tier pension proposal off the table with the compliant LMP unions, who would have accepted the cut had NUHW and CNA accepted it. 

This begs the question posed last week by LaborNotes: "Will Kaiser's Labor Partnership Crack?" 

The Labor–Management Partnership has been co-opted by Kaiser and SEIU–UHW to the detriment of the workforce. 

From LaborNotes:

Sophia Simms Walker, a ward clerk/transcriber in Labor and Delivery who's put in 26 years at Kaiser, served on SEIU–UHW's bargaining committee last time around. The experience left a bitter taste in her mouth. It felt like a charade, she said, "to make [members] believe they had some input" — but at the end, there was "stuff in writing that we hadn't even discussed."

She concluded the real bargaining must have happened behind closed doors. "How do they have the [ratification] date set, if they don't already know how it's going to go?"

The technically nonprofit Kaiser is making money hand over fist — $1 billion in the just the first quarter of 2015. Kaiser is awash in new patients. Enrollment in its health plan is booming. Trouble is, say the non-partnership unions, staffing isn't keeping pace. NUHW's mental health workers in particular say understaffing has hit crisis levels. Members have tried everything, including repeated strikes, to push the issue to the fore. 

"They [Kaiser] get a lot of mileage out their rhetoric that they really listen to and value their employees," says Clement Papazian, rank-and-file president of the NUHW's Northern California Kaiser psychiatric chapter. "Nothing could be farther from the truth, in our experience."

Ignored by the company, members finally took their complaints to California's Department of Managed Health Care, which backed them up — citing Kaiser repeatedly and fining it $4 million. Kaiser's response is to punish those who speak up. In May, NUHW members picketed to protest the firing of whistleblower Dr. Alex Wang, who's been speaking out against long wait times for mental health patients.

"We've gotten this rhetoric directly from executive-level management: 'We do not want to reward employees for the behavior of the past three years,'" Papazian said. "It's jaw-dropping hypocrisy, given the philosophy of the labor–management partnership."

Click here to read the LaborNotes story. 

Partnership Unions' Bargaining Survey Speaks Volumes

Here's the latest from Kaiser.

The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (a.k.a. "the partnership unions") has begun circulating a bargaining survey in advance of upcoming national negotiations covering 90,000 workers at Kaiser facilities across the U.S.  The negotiations are scheduled to begin April 14, 2015.

So… Are top officials at the partnership unions planning to fight Kaiser's effort to cut workers' pensions and health benefits?

It sure doesn't look like it.

Check out the Coalition's bargaining survey (see below). It doesn't even mention the idea of preserving the defined-benefit pension plan that Kaiser is trying to replace with a 401(k) plan. And it fails to mention the health benefit cuts that Kaiser has already proposed to the Coalition.

Instead, here’s how the survey attempts to re-frame the Coalition’s dumbed-down bargaining goals:

Completely lame and dishonest, right?

Also absent from the survey? Any mention of Kaiser's record $14.5 billion in profits and its skyrocketing executive pay.

So who's responsible for the survey?

SEIU-UHW, with half of the Coalition's total membership of 90,000 workers, is by far the largest union inside the Coalition and consequently calls all the shots inside the Coalition. In fact, one of Dave Regan's staffers -- Hal Ruddick – is the Executive Director of the Coalition and will be its lead negotiator at the bargaining table.

Meanwhile, the non-partnership unions are intensifying their fight against Kaiser even as partnership union officials prepare to jam cuts down their members’ throats.

Earlier this month, the California Nurses Association’s 18,000 RNs conducted a two-day strike at Kaiser. Also this month, NUHW’s members -- who’ve waged a four-year battle against the cuts and scored a $4 million fine against the HMO -- announced the results of a membership vote to authorize another statewide strike against Kaiser. And in Hawaii, UNITE HERE Local 5 has staged multiple strikes and job actions to oppose cuts to workers' benefits.

Stay tuned.

  “National Bargaining Survey” for 2015 Negotiations, Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions

Dave Regan's Secret Deal Brings More Cuts to SEIU Workers in Ohio

What's in store for workers under Dave Regan's secret partnership deal with the California Hospital Association?

Well, workers in California might wanna chat with their Ohio counterparts who’ve been reaping the bitter fruits of Regan's earlier sellout "partnership" with Catholic Health Partners (CHP), a $6 billion hospital chain in Ohio.

In 2008, Regan inked an infamous back-room deal with CHP’s execs. At the time, Regan was president of SEIU 1199 Ohio. 

Under the deal, the company’s execs -- not the workers -- asked the NLRB to hold unionization elections for 8,000 workers. And get this: the Boss asked for only one union to be on the ballot: SEIU!

The backroom deal -- negotiated by SEIU’s Dave Regan, Scott Courtney and Mary Kay Henry -- ultimately led to SEIU's violent attack on a Labor Notes conference in 2008 that sent some conference-goers to the emergency room and left David Smith, an SEIU homecare worker, dead of a heart attack.

So why was CHP willing to ink a secret unionization deal with SEIU? Here's a clue.

In the first contract, SEIU negotiated ZERO improvements to workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions. A company official described it this way:

There are no separate standards giving Union employees more money or rights and privileges than non-union employees have in the workplace.

Then, in 2012, SEIU let the company eliminate workers’ seniority rights and their defined-benefit pension plan.

Fast-forward to 2014. 

Last week, The Morning Journal (Lorain, Ohio) reported that CHP is now demanding even more cuts from SEIU’s members at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Lorain, OH, including:

• the elimination of step increases in the wage scale.
• the elimination of paid sick time.
• the elimination of overtime pay.
• cuts to workers' health insurance that would force them to pay $5,000 more in out-of-pocket expenses per year.

Damn.

So… is CHP going bankrupt? Hardly! Profits are up over last year -- $113 million in profits during the first six months of 2014, according to the financial statements on CHP’s website.

The moral of the story? 

You can trust Regan and his Purple Palace pals as far as you can throw them. They're happy to toss workers under the bus to keep their business buddies happy and the union dues flowing.

Video: Top Kaiser Executive Reveals Truth in Behind-Closed-Doors Speech

Kaiser's Robert Pearl

Check out this video. 

The resourceful folks over at NUHW got ahold of a top Kaiser exec discussing Kaiser’s super-profits during a behind-closed-doors speech.

The exec -- Dr. Robert Pearl -- is the CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG), one of Kaiser’s various for-profit arms. TPMG runs Kaiser’s clinics and outpatient facilities in Northern California.

In the speech, Pearl reveals that TPMG pocketed $1.2 billion in profits last year. That’s in addition to the $2.7 billion in profits that Kaiser's non-profit arm reported.

TPMG’s profits are usually hidden from public view because the company is owned by private shareholders who are not required to make their financial statements available to the public.

TPMG’s booming profits are another bit of jaw-dropping news for Kaiser’s workers. 

Why?

Kaiser has been holding mandatory meetings -- called “Turbulent Times” -- during which the HMO’s fatcat execs tell workers that the sky is falling and workers must accept cuts… like the massive benefit cuts that SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan already accepted in a secret “unpublished side letter," say sources.

Check out the other parts of Pearl’s speech. He says Kaiser is preparing for big strikes by the California Nurses Association because the nurses will refuse to accept the cuts that SEIU-UHW and the "partnership unions" have already secretly agreed to. Here's what Pearl says:

…our nurses union has a contract up this year that will not get settled. There's no way it gets settled. And so we're looking at strikes inevitably coming up sometime in the latter part of 2014 heading into 2015.

Source: SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan Signed "Unpublished Side Letter" to Force Cuts on Kaiser Workers

It's been widely reported that SEIU-UHW and the other "partnership unions" have already signed a deal that allows Kaiser Permanente to slash their members' defined-benefit pensions and health benefits.

Now, for the first time, sources are providing details about the secret deal. Here's what they say.

Sources say the deal was inked during the final hours of the partnership negotiations in 2012. At that point, Regan and John August (Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions) signed an "unpublished side letter" that requires SEIU-UHW and the other partnership unions to eliminate their members' pensions and slash their health benefits.

Because the deal is memorialized as an "unpublished side letter" attached to workers’ contract, Regan and Co. believe they can hide it from the membership.

And that's not the only detail to emerge from Tasty’s sources.

They also describe the precise moment when Regan and his pals inked the dirty deal.

During the final moments of the negotiations, a handful of the partnership union’s fatcat officials met privately with Kaiser's execs. Rank-and-file workers were specifically excluded from the room. And when Regan and August emerged from behind closed doors, they announced that the contract negotiations were done.

This insider’s account matches up perfectly with workers' previously published descriptions of the final hours of the negotiations. Check out an excerpt from a 2012 video-taped interview with Sophia Sims, a rank-and-file member of SEIU-UHW’s bargaining committee who was at the negotiations when Regan, August and other officials stepped behind closed doors to ink the secret deal.

Since that day, Kaiser has attempted to force these same cuts on the members of NUHW and UNITE HERE, who’ve waged multiple strikes against Kaiser with the support of the California Nurses Association. According to sources, Kaiser will soon try to push SEIU-UHW’s cuts on the CNA when 18,000 nurses begin negotiations with Kaiser later this year.

Here’s the video.

Hey SEIU-UHW members… it's time to tell Dave Regan: “Show us the unpublished side letter!”