SEIU-UHW Fires Union Staffers Attempting to Form Union

Last week, SEIU-UHW laid off a number of staff just days after they petitioned the NLRB for a government-supervised election to form a union, according to NLRB records.

The staff are employed by a nonprofit organization called “Good Health for California,” which was founded last year by SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan to enroll Californians in the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”).

The organization, with an annual budget of approximately $2 million, has more than 60 staff in Los Angeles, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Sacramento. Staffers include Organizers, Screeners, and Data Entry Associates who run enrollment events to sign up Californians for Obamacare, which is called “Covered California” in the Golden State.

Until recently, the organization was headed by Rebecca Hanson, a former SEIU staffer who recently left “Good Health for California” to take another job at SEIU-UHW.

On May 2, the staffers at “Good Health for California” submitted formal paperwork to the NLRB requesting an election so they can join “United Staff Workers,” which currently represents SEIU-UHW’s organizers, field representatives, researchers and other staff.

On May 5 -- just three days later -- “Good Health for California” announced it was laying off many of the staffers who requested the unionization election, according to Hunter Pyle (the staff union’s attorney) and SEIU-UHW staffer Jared Mayhugh.

A May 5 e-mail sent by Pyle to the NLRB regarding the layoffs reads as follows:

The screener canvassers were notified today that they will be released. I just got this information this afternoon that they plan to lay them off.

Regan, who has repeatedly teamed up with hospital CEOs to slash workers’ benefits, also apparently favors the union-busting tactics employed by his CEO buddies.

Regan is already under investigation by the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s office for his allegedly violent assault against a process server. He will now likely find himself under the crosshairs of the NLRB for violating workers’ labor rights.

...and the contradictions grow even deeper.

It turns out that "Good Health for California’s" formal business name is “Good Health Good Jobs for California,” according to the California Secretary of State (see below).

Hmmm… I guess when Diamond Dave used the term “Good Jobs” in the organization's title, he didn’t actually intend it to apply to the organization’ own (non-union and now fired) staff.

Way to go, Dave!

What other nifty tricks does Diamond Dave have up his purple sleeve?

Nothing will surprise Tasty anymore.

From the California Secretary of State's incorporation records.

Reports from SEIU-UHW's Ratification Votes at Kaiser Permanente

What’s going on with SEIU-UHW’s contract ratification vote at Kaiser Permanente? Well, Tasty has been getting lots of interesting reports from workers who describe scenes like this one:

I went to vote and there were 7 SEIU reps in purple shirts inside the voting room. 7 of them. They check your name on a list and then you have to mark the ballot on a table right in front of them. No privacy. They can see how your voting! It was intimidating. Why do they need 7 people to watch us vote. Oh yeah, and there were no copies of the agreement in the room for us to look at. NUHW is the only one whose handing out the agreement to employees.

Other reports include these:

• SEIU blocked many workers from voting because their names don’t appear on SEIU’s list. In one case, SEIU’s staffers even blocked a union member “in good standing” who’s been paying full union dues for 18 years.
• In several facilities, SEIU-UHW staffers forced union members to leave the voting room because they were “asking too many questions” about SEIU’s tentative agreement.
• At many sites, SEIU staffers are pressuring workers to vote "yes" on the proposed agreement.
• In at least one case, a worker reports that SEIU had pre-marked his ballot when he showed up to vote.

At Kaiser Modesto Medical Center, a worker tried to 'watch-dog' the vote by sitting quietly in the voting room to observe her union's balloting process. An SEIU-UHW staffer named Jared Mayhugh quickly put an end to that. He had her removed by four Kaiser security guards.

So how are workers voting? Well, Tasty hears that SEIU is only doing public counts of the ballots in some facilities. In other facilities, they simply take away the ballot boxes at the end of the day. At one site where SEIU actually counted the ballots, they discovered that there were more ballots in the box than the number of people who’d been checked off on the list of voters. When people said “WTF!,” an SEIU staffer replied, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out when we get back to the office.”

Despite SEIU’s dirty tricks, workers at more than a half dozen sites have actually succeeded in voting down SEIU’s tentative agreements! Tasty hears this happened at Modesto Medical Center, Stockton, Livermore, Delta Fair, Modesto Bangs Clinic and Alameda. 

Stay tuned for more crookin'! SEIU's ratification votes will continue into June.

Big Bust for SEIU's Wellness Walk

Although readers won’t be surprised by the news, Tasty hears that SEIU’s wellness walk at Kaiser Permanente on March 1st (aka "the Great 2012 SEIU-UHW Step Up") was a colossal failure. Workers report that only handfuls of SEIU members turned up for the events at hospitals across California.

Just days ago, SEIU officials had confidently predicted they’d turn out 5,000 Kaiser workers to the wellness walk. Instead, the total statewide turnout was closer to 200-300 people. Check out these pictures from workers.

Here's SEIU's wellness walk in Stockton:

Here's the turnout at Hayward:

This is as big as the 'crowd' got at Antioch:

 At Union City, the wellness walkers never even left the hospital's cafeteria:

Here's SEIU's wellness staffer Latasha Winslow-Beavers taking a picture of walkers at Roseville Medical Center:

 At Walnut Creek, a group of 8-10 workers turned out.

According to a worker, one of the “walkers” pictured in the above photo later tossed his purple shirt in the garbage after seeing proof that SEIU officials had never intended to use the event to protest Kaiser’s proposed benefits cuts -- even though that's the story that SEIU organizers used to lure workers to the event.

Here's a picture from Manteca. Take special note of the big pile of unused purple shirts and bottles of water at 12:18pm -- some 45 minutes after the event was supposed to have started. Sources say the people in the picture include SEIU staffer Jared Mayhugh and Contract Specialist Cali Lombardi.  

 

At Richmond, a total of five workers collected their free pedometers from SEIU-UHW staffer Fola Afariogun before returning to the cafeteria. At Modesto Medical Center, SEIU didn’t even attempt to hold an event because SEIU is so unpopular. 

Even SEIU’s own photos -- posted online -- show how few workers turned out for SEIU-UHW's "Great Step Up." Check these out (the first is from Manteca and the second is Downey):

The abysmally low turnout wasn’t due to a lack of resources. In fact, SEIU's Dave Regan spent suitcases of members’ dues money on the wellness walk. He reportedly bought 10,000 purple pedometers emblazoned with SEIU-UHW’s logo -- and handed them out to walkers for free.

SEIU also ordered custom-made banners for the walk.

SEIU even deployed giant signs depicting SEIU’s SpongeBob-like cartoon character in an effort to inspire Kaiser workers to walk.  

SEIU’s partner -- Kaiser Permanente -- also threw its full support behind the event. Workers report that Kaiser’s executives allowed SEIU staffers to set up purple tables on the hospitals’ campuses to stage the walk. When one worker asked a security guard to explain how that was possible under the hospital's rules, the guard shrugged and said, “We don’t remove anyone unless we get orders from the boss upstairs.”

Tasty hears that some Kaiser supervisors even used departmental meetings to instruct employees to participate in SEIU’s wellness walk.

Early in the day, nervous SEIU officials realized the wellness walk would be a massive failure… so SEIU's Steve Trossman began carpet-bombing news outlets with his weapons of mass deception. In fact, even before the wellness walks had begun, SEIU published a press release announcing that “hundreds” of workers had already completed their wellness walks at just a single hospital in Southern California.

So what does it mean when a union's rank-and-file membership so thoroughly and completely repudiates their leaders? A large turnout for the wellness walk was supposed to signal the workers' support for Dave Regan's approach to negotiations with Kaiser. In the end, workers used their feet... but not to support Regan's concessionary approach to bargaining with Kaiser. Instead, workers registered a clear vote of "no confidence" in Regan just five days before he and John August begin negotiations with Kaiser's executives on March 6th. 

Kaiser Strike Update

Greg Maron

Support for Kaiser workers’ historic strike keeps on growing! The Teamsters have joined 23,000 Kaiser workers (from NUHW, the California Nurses Association and the Stationary Engineers… plus members of the Pharmacists Guild) in pledging to honor the picket line. The Teamsters gave “strike sanction” to the walkout, meaning truck drivers won’t cross workers’ picket lines.

Meanwhile, Jobs with Justice put out the following email that hammers Kaiser for pocketing $5.7 billion in profits while it ‘short-staffs’ its hospitals and clinics and tries to cut health and pension benefits for frontline caregivers.

Even the Democratic Party got in on the action, announcing they’ll be walking picket lines with Kaiser Permanente workers on Thursday. And Beyond Chron published this article on the upcoming strike.

What about SEIU?  Sources tell Tasty they’re getting increasingly desperate as more and more of SEIU’s own members say they plan to honor the strike. This has caused Dave Regan to deploy purple-shirted storm troopers to Kaiser facilities, where they’re teaming up with Kaiser's supervisors to wage their latest fear-and-disinformation campaign. 

Check out the following email that SEIU sent to SEIU’s social worker members via Kaiser’s internal email system (that partnership really comes in handy!). The email threatens SEIU’s members by claiming they’re “not protected” if they honor the strike (which is plain wrong). Check out the last line of the email, which seems to say that Kaiser workers should never strike. Sounds like the boss wrote the email, right?

As for SEIU’s strike-breaking staffers, Tasty hears that SEIU’s Greg Maron put on quite a performance on Monday… which won him Tasty’s “Scab of the Day” award. Registered Nurses at Kaiser Modesto Medical Center report that Maron -- along with SEIU staffers Jared Mayhugh and Jose Santana -- used their Kaiser-issued ID badges to enter the hospital’s locked nursing units and then rip down CNA flyers from the nurses’ bulletin boards.

Maron, who’s apparently been taking charm classes from Dave Regan, then threatened the stunned RNs and on-duty SEIU members by telling them they’d be disciplined if they participate in the strike.

To finish off a performance befitting a third grader, Maron started taunting the RNs that, “CNA is weak.” Way to go, Greg! That makes total sense!  Let’s see… SEIU’s members won’t even listen to you… so you gotta resort to threatening your own members with discipline... so... SEIU is super powerful, dude! You know what would be, like, totally powerful? What about threatening SEIU members’ children? And then tearing up their homework if they don’t listen?

Meanwhile, SEIU’s parade of abuses against its own membership seems to be reaching a tipping point… kinda like a giant pile of bullshit teetering atop SEIU’s Purple Palace. Check out the email below! (B/t/w, “CKPU” stands for “Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions”).