Video of Protest against SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry at “Fight for $15” Convention

Here’s a one-minute video that captures the moment at last weekend’s national “Fight for $15” convention when organizers attempted to deliver a letter to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry to protest her refusal to allow them to join SEIU’s staff union.

The footage, recorded by C-SPAN, begins with Henry speaking from the stage at the Greater Richmond Convention Center… and then shows reportedly 100 “Fight for $15” organizers and supporters trying to make their way to the stage.

At first, Henry attempts to ignore the organizers and continues with her speech. The organizers, carrying signs that say “$15 Minimum Wage and Union Rights for All Means FF15 Organizers Too!,” are blocked on their way to the stage, a sign is ripped from their hands, and parts of the crowd chant “Fight for $15” in an effort to suppress the protesters.

According to a news article, security guards subsequently removed the "Fight for $15" organizers from the convention.

Since April, Henry has refused the organizers’ request to allow them to join a staff union, the “Union of Union Representatives” (UUR), which already represents SEIU’s organizers across the nation.

SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry to Fight for $15 Staff: “No union for you!”

Remember those 100 “Fight for $15” organizers who requested to join the “Union of Union Representatives” (UUR), a staff union that already represents SEIU’s organizers across the nation?

Four months ago, they formally submitted their request to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.

Since then, Henry has rejected their request despite announcing in May that SEIU will spend millions on a new “Fight for $15 Organizing Campaign Center.”

That set the scene for last weekend’s action in Richmond, Virginia, where nearly 100 “Fight for $15” organizers and supporters confronted SEIU President Mary Kay Henry during her speech to SEIU’s first national “Fight for $15” convention.

As Henry spoke to the crowd, the Fight for $15 organizers and their supporters began walking towards the stage to present her with a letter, according to an article published in in Raw Story:

[Jodi Lynn] Fennell [an organizer with the Child Care Fight for $15 campaign in Las Vegas] says, “Nearly 100 organizers and supporters gathered, moving up toward the stage peacefully. Our plan was simply to deliver a letter to Mary Kay Henry because she doesn’t make herself available to speak with us.”

…But they never got to hand the letter to Henry. Inside sources at SEIU say the union was prepared for such an incident, and sprang into action. Fennell says, “Security prevented us from getting to the stage.” Meanwhile, on the speakers’ platform, Henry stepped back and a group of African-Americans and Latino/as who sit on the national organizing committee for Fight for $15 stepped up.

One woman on stage with Henry grabbed the mic. She berated the staff organizers and their supporters below as cameras broadcast the convention…

As Henry stood smiling faintly behind the human wall, the speaker continued…

Barajas-Ames says the UUR organizers stood before Henry for 15 minutes. As the

Mary Kay Henry speaking at the Fight for $15 convention

speakers on stage led the crowd in chants of “$15 and a union,” Barajas-Ames says, “The security guards became hostile and aggressive, physically pushing us back. We stepped back and stood peacefully. Our signs were grabbed and torn up.”

…But that was just the beginning of the troubles for the members of the UUR organizing committee. Shortly afterward, Barajas-Ames and Fennell were personally called by the national director of the Child Care Fight for $15. The two organizers were told they would not be attending the events and protests on Saturday they had been organizing toward for months. Instead, they were to pack their bags as they were being flown out at 6 a.m. back to Las Vegas. Fennell claims the national director also told them, “We will be expecting you to pay for the cost of the hotel.”

… A total of five Fight for $15 organizers who support UUR were shipped home for trying to bring attention to their cause.

Fennell says, “This represents the exact same type of retaliation that corporations do to low-wage workers.”

So how does Mary Kay Henry justify her refusal to allow the organizers to unionize?

According to an article authored by David Moberg in In These Times:

At first, Calderon says, SEIU maintained their employer was the payroll processing firm that handles their paychecks. Now, he says, the international insists they’re employed by the individual organizing committees that direct each city’s Fight for $15 campaign.

According to Calderon, nearly 99 percent of funding for Fight for $15 organizers, as well as vehicles and supplies, comes from SEIU.

Raw Story reports that “Fight for $15” organizers in Las Vegas are paid by an SEIU subcontractor called the “Ardleigh Group.” It describes the company this way:

One former employee calls it a “faceless, shadowy” corporation that acts as a pass-through to hide employer responsibility. SEIU documents appear to show it using paper outfits to funnel money to the Ardleigh Group, which then pays workers on SEIU projects who say they are being denied their legal union rights.

"Fight for $15" organizers

The Ardleigh Group describes itself as a “political consulting and classic door-to-door campaigning” firm that’s been hired by a variety of candidates and organizations across the nation. Its name appears in SEIU's online job announcements for “Fight for $15” organizer positions.

Interestingly, some of these job announcements were posted by SEIU’s Recruitment Director Pamela Kieffer, the wife of SEIU-UHW’s Dave Kieffer.

Headquartered in Washington DC, the Ardleigh Group is headed by Bernard “Blair” Talmadge and Bryan L. Stewart. 

Talmadge, who grew up in Philadelphia, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Philadelphia City Commissioners in 2011. From 1997-2000, he served as a “Deputy Commissioner” to his brother, City Commissioner Alex Talmadge, Jr. 

According to Blair Talmadge, he has managed campaigns for multiple candidates for state and federal offices.

FYI, The London Guardian also covered last weekend’s action in Richmond (“Fight for $15 organizers demand employee status from SEIU,” August 12, 2016).

SEIU Forges New Frontiers in Hypocrisy as It Denies Unionization for "Fight for $15" Organizers

From UUR's Facebook page

At SEIU’s convention in Detroit last month, SEIU officials trumpeted their Fight for $15 campaign and announced they’ll soon establish a “Fight for $15 Organizing Campaign Center.”

Apparently, it’ll be non-union.

SEIU’s top officials are denying the right of Fight for $15 organizers to join a union, according to charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Approximately 100 “Fight for $15” organizers across the US -- who are funded by SEIU but employed by subsidiary organizations such as the Western Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago -- earn wages and benefits substantially lower than those of SEIU staffers.

So on April 12, “Fight for $15” organizers formally asked SEIU officials to allow them to join the “Union of Union Representatives” (UUR), a staff union that already represents SEIU’s organizers across the nation.

The UUR’s president, Conor Hanlon, explained it this way:

"We are strong believers in the work of the Fight for $15 campaign. Our [UUR] members work side by side with non-union staff who are on the front lines of this campaign. Why, then, should Fight for $15 staff not be part of our union?"

A recent article describes what happened in the days after Fight for $15 organizers delivered their request:

Three days later, Christopher Prado, a Las Vegas-based Fight for $15 organizer and one of the original group to file for representation, was fired.

“At noon on Tuesday, April 12, I had a meeting with management about my work and our plan for the next 10 weeks,” Prado said over the phone. “At 5 p.m., we submitted our request as Fight for $15 organizers to be absorbed into the UUR contract. And on Friday, April 15, I was retaliated against.” His managers fired him with one week’s severance pay.

“The stated reason for his termination was a lack of budget,” said Calderon, but the UUR believes this was a lie, as “the budget was funded for the coming months.” This led the UUR to file an Unfair Labor Practice claim with the National Labor Relations Board against SEIU on the grounds of retaliation for union activity.

UUR’s lawyers soon filed “Unfair Labor Practice” charges at the NLRB alleging that SEIU illegally retaliated against the organizer for trying to join a union.

These aren’t the first union-busting charges against SEIU officials.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that UUR filed charges after Purple Palace officials laid off 75 of its 200 staff employees and shifted work to outsourced companies.

SEIU officials’ latest dose of purple-hued integrity has already been covered by various media outlets, including the International Business Times, Politico, and Jacobin. Here’s an excerpt from the International Business Times:

Now the UUR is insisting that organizers with the Fight for $15 campaign should also be unionized — and that the SEIU has violated its own staff's collective bargaining contract by not letting Fight for $15 workers join UUR.

Although the SEIU has sometimes described Fight for $15 as a semi-autonomous entity, distinct from the union itself, the UUR says workers affiliated with the campaign are effectively SEIU employees. As such, they should have representation of their own, said the UUR in a statement Monday.

In California, SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is facing his own charges that he retaliated against staffers employed by one of SEIU-UHW’s nonprofit subsidiaries (“Good Health for California”) after staffers requested an NLRB election to join SEIU-UHW’s staff union. According to NLRB records, Regan laid off many of the staffers soon after they requested the election.

The saying goes... “Do as I say, not what I do.”

Stay tuned.

SEIU Officials: “Help us during Kaiser election… before we lay you off”

SEIU is parachuting more organizers into California for the election at Kaiser Permanente… even though this will be the last campaign for many of them.

According to Tasty’s sources, SEIU officials will soon be laying off a large number of its staff due to SEIU’s declining membership and its $42 million in red ink, which were detailed in SEIU’s recent filing with the U.S. Department of Labor.  

The Purple Palace has already asked staff to take voluntary retirements and will soon begin implementing the layoffs, say Tasty’s sources.

SEIU's Dennis Rivera

The layoffs are coming despite the fact that the Purple Palace lavishes fat salaries upon its top officials. Check out the case of Dennis Rivera, a “Senior Policy Adviser” to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.  Rivera was formerly the president of SEIU 1199 New York. 

In 2012, SEIU paid Rivera a salary of $275,764... and then tossed him another $20,000 in payments via a separate “consulting” contract with SEIU. (See excerpt below,)

Hmm… why is SEIU’s Henry giving $20K side gigs to one of her top advisers who's already a full-time SEIU employee? Does Dennis only begin his consulting work once he clocks out at the end of the day?

Interestingly, SEIU’s $20K in consulting fees were delivered to the island of Culebra, located off of Puerto Rica, where Rivera reportedly owns “a mansion” and farm in a setting that's described as a "tropical paradise." Here are excerpts from SEIU’s LM-2 detailing SEIU's payments to Rivera during 2012. Click on image below to enlarge it.

Source: SEIU's DOL Form lm-2 for 2012

The layoffs of SEIU staffers are only the latest in a string of conflicts between SEIU and its staff. 

Last September, SEIU’s clerical staff picketed the Purple Palace after Mary Kay Henry demanded a three-year wage freeze from the staff during contract negotiations. And here’s an older column written by the former president of the Union of Union Representatives (UUR), one of SEIU’s staff unions, in which he sharply criticizes SEIU's top officials. And back in 2008, the UUR even passed a formal resolution urging its members to refuse to participate in SEIU's trusteeship of SEIU-UHW.