SEIU’s Neal Bisno: “No idea what Dave was thinking”

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is facing mounting waves of backlash after teaming up with hospital corporations to undermine California’s law on nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. In fact, Tasty hears that SEIU RNs in California are so angry they’ve begun contacting other unions for help.

And that’s not all. SEIU RNs from other states are also up in arms. Why? They’re trying to pass their own versions of nurse-to-patient ratio legislation that’s patterned after California’s first-in-the-nation law.

Confronted by the blowback, SEIU officials are back-pedalling away from Regan as quickly as they can. And as they beat their hasty retreat, they’re repeatedly tossing Regan under the bus.

Check out this statement by SEIU Local 121’s Executive Director Sue Weinstein, who discusses the “vocal and passionate reaction by our Registered Nurse members” against Regan’s ratio-busting efforts. The statement says:

We are calling on UHW to declare nurse-to-patient staffing ratios “off limits” in its ongoing work with the California Hospital Association as they explore cost savings and revenue-generating initiatives.

Despite her criticism, Weinstein says she LOVES Regan’s “visionary agreement with the California Hospital Association,” which “holds exciting promise for SEIU and the labor movement.” Hmmm. It sounds like Weinstein actually supported Regan’s deal with the CHA… until she was against it. Nothing like some late-onset cold feet to send Weinstein running for the hills.

Meanwhile, a source sent Tasty an interesting email from Neal Bisno, the president of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania and a member of SEIU’s International Executive Board. Here’s an excerpt:

No idea what Dave was thinking - you can rest assured that our local and SEIU are strongly opposed to any suspension or other dimunition of any aspect of the hard-won CA RN to patient ratios law.  We have every intention of continuing to fight for identical legislation. This is a patient safety and patient lives issue, a valuing of nurses issue, a nurses union issue. Unfortunate incident, and rest assured a subject of intense reaction from SEIU Nurse Alliance leaders and members, including myself, inside our union.

Thud!!    That, my friends, is the sound of bus tires rolling over Regan like a well-worn speed bump.

Finally, here’s more news coverage about Regan’s collusion with industry CEOs. The article from “Beyond Chron” features quotes from RoseAnn DeMoro (the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association). She calls Regan “an embarrassment to the labor movement,” “overtly disgraceful,” and describes his arguments as “idiotic” and “drivel.”

She also recounts details from the “emergency” conference call convened by the California Labor Federation’s Art Pulaski during which Regan “made an impassioned speech on behalf of the CA hospital association…"

The article issues this challenge to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry:

Dave Regan is the proverbial “5th Column” in California labor. He has battled UNITE HERE, SEIU Local 1021, NUHW and now CNA on behalf of a vision that the rest of the labor movement rejects...

National SEIU President Mary Kay Henry’s passivity in response to Regan’s shenanigans is remarkable. If she believes silence is the best way to get him to change course, she's been proven wrong time and again. Henry's passivity empowers Regan and is undermining SEIU in California.

Well, Mary Kay?

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan Joins Hospital Industry to Roll Back Nurse Staffing Law... and Suffers Smackdown

In a jaw-dropping move that’s producing seismic reactions across California, SEIU’s Dave Regan revealed just how far he’s climbed into bed with California’s hospital corporations. Here’s what’s going on.

On Thursday, Regan teamed up with the California Hospital Association to try to roll back a California law that requires hospitals to meet minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios designed to ensure safe care for patients. These safe-staffing ratios have been in place for 40 years in ICUs, Neonatal ICUs and ERs. And in 2004, the California legislature extended staffing ratios to other hospital units like oncology, medical-surgical and pediatric units.  

As caregivers and their unions pushed for the ratios, the California Hospital Association (CHA) aggressively fought them, even spending millions of dollars on an unsuccessful lawsuit to overturn the law. Why?

The CHA is the “chamber of commerce” for California’s hospital industry. It’s run by multi-billion-dollar corporations like Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health, Sutter Health, HCA and Tenet Healthcare. For these companies, fewer staff means more profits. In 2010, for example, California’s hospital industry earned more than $4.4 billion in profits.

After the industry failed to roll back the ratios through lobbying and lawsuits, they enlisted their new pal, Dave Regan, to engineer a back-door legislative maneuver to achieve the same outcome. On Thursday, Regan and the CHA tried to insert language into a “trailer bill” attached to California’s state budget. The “trailer” would suspend the ratios during any meal and rest breaks. According to SEIU’s “talking points,” this initial rollback of the law would save hospital corporations more than $400 million.  

So… was “Wall Street Dave” successful in his underhanded efforts to roll back the ratio law? Not by a long shot. Instead, Regan suffered a series of head-spinning smackdowns that one source described as “utterly humiliating.” Here’s what happened:

On Thursday, Regan dispatched members of the SEIU California State Council, headed by Bill Lloyd, to the State Capitol in an effort to find a single California legislator who would “sponsor” the trailer to the budget bill. End result? Not a single legislator agreed to put their name on the bill!

Next, Regan called his buddy Art Pulaski at the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. Pulaski, who was formerly married to SEIU’s Josie Mooney, agreed to convene an “emergency” phone call of the Federation’s Executive Council, which is made up of union leaders across the state.

During Thursday night’s call, Regan personally pitched his proposal to the Executive Council and then asked the labor leaders to endorse CHA/SEIU's effort to roll back the ratio law. Regan argued that the hospital industry needed relief from the law in order to improve its profitability. (Apparently, $4.1 billion isn’t enough for Dave's buddies at the CHA.) SEIU’s Bill Lloyd also spoke in favor of the proposal.  RoseAnn DeMoro (the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association) spoke against it. 

In the end, the Executive Council voted 60-2 against Regan’s proposal! Regan’s only two votes came from SEIU officials: Bill Lloyd and Mike Garcia of SEIU Local 1877.

In case Regan’s backside wasn’t stinging enough, yesterday the California Labor Federation sent this letter to California’s governor and legislative leaders, stating:

The California Labor Federation opposes any proposal to suspend nurse-to-patient staffing ratios during meal and rest periods. Such proposal would endanger both patient safety and worker health and safety, two core values we support and defend. We ask you to not include this proposal in any budget trailer bill or legislation to come.

And in a press release issued last night, the CNA’s RoseAnn DeMoro delivered this body blow to Regan:

It would be hard to imagine a more immoral and corrupt scenario than for a labor leader to be lobbying other unions to endanger patients on behalf of corporate hospital executives whose only concern is increasing profits.

Meanwhile, a source sent Tasty an email from CNA leaders with this reference to Regan:

Nurses are miracle workers, but grafting testicles on someone is outside of our scope of practice.

Ouch!!!

And earlier today, one of NUHW’s RN leaders sent this email blast to healthcare workers across California, including SEIU’s members. Also, here's news coverage of Regan's debacle.

Tasty hears that Regan will be facing more smackdowns in the days ahead. 

Before launching his harebrained scheme, Regan somehow forgot that five SEIU unions in California happen to represent 16,000 Registered Nurses, including SEIU Locals 1021, 121, 721, 521 and 221. Oh... and these RNs are BIG big fans of the same ratio law that Regan is trying to undermine. Tasty wonders what the RNs think about SEIU just about now…

Second, Regan’s effort on behalf of some of California’s largest companies has further isolated Regan -- and SEIU -- from the rest of California’s labor movement. One person described Regan’s effort this way: “Labor should never put takeaways on the table for labor.” Another said: “What’s next? Will SEIU want to roll back laws on lunch breaks and overtime?” Tasty got other emails calling Regan “the hospital association’s toady” and “a disgrace.”

Lastly, Regan’s apparent role as a CHA lobbyist has focused new attention on his “visionary” partnership deal with the CHA, which Regan and the CHA signed last month. Regan has famously refused to allow SEIU-UHW’s own members to read the “ground-breaking” agreement, as SEIU's Steve Trossman described it. In fact, rank-and-file members of Regan’s own union filed disciplinary charges against Regan for refusing to share a copy of his secret pact with the CHA.

What does the deal say? It’s clear that the Bosses are buttering Regan’s bread. But how much butter? Is the CHA bankrolling Regan’s efforts to undermine caregivers and patients across the state?

It looks like “Wall Street Dave” has tied SEIU into so many knots that it’ll take at least a month to figure things out. That is… if Regan can extract himself from the Bosses’ bed for long enough to attend to such matters.

Tasty especially likes the following homemade graphic, sent by a reader, that captures workers’ attitudes about Dave Regan and his real bosses:

SEIU-UHW Executive Board Member Resigns over Kaiser Bargaining

In predictable fashion, Dave Regan and Co. unveiled their final act of disinformation to wrap up SEIU’s contract negotiations with Kaiser Permanente.

Late last week, Regan announced a “landslide” victory in Kaiser workers’ ratification vote, which was marred by widespread misconduct. Here’s an SEIU leaflet claiming that “a majority” of Kaiser workers participated in the vote, and that 85% of them voted in favor of the deal negotiated by Dave Regan and John August.

Sources say both numbers are laughable. After all, workers at more than a dozen facilities voted down the tentative agreement, as recorded in public vote counts demanded by workers. Furthermore, workers report that nowhere near 50% of the bargaining unit of 43,000 workers participated in the votes.

Meanwhile, SEIU-UHW officials -- in a mad rush to fabricate favorable voting results -- ended up producing even more distrust among workers. For example, on the same day that SEIU’s “extended” voting sessions concluded at Kaiser Santa Clara Medical Center in Northern California, a worker returned home from work and was stunned to find in his mailbox an SEIU-UHW mailer -- delivered by the U.S. Postal Service -- announcing the statewide results of the voting… which had concluded only several hours earlier at his facility!  

It takes many days to design, print and mail a 43,000-piece mailing. So did SEIU actually count the ballots? Or did Regan rely on a crystal ball to gaze into the minds of Kaiser workers?

If SEIU staffers did any “counting,” Tasty guesses they employed the same meticulous methods they used to “count” the five million steps that Kaiser workers supposedly took during SEIU’s poorly attended “Wellness Walk.” That phase of SEIU-UHW’s negotiations was also marked by another memorable moment of purple disinformation when SEIU’s Joe Simoes famously compared SEIU’s Wellness Walk to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks’s act of civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws.

SEIU’s credibility on the ratification vote faced other blows. For example, SEIU-UHW failed to provide copies of its tentative agreement to Kaiser workers… until NUHW got a copy and posted it on its website.

This week, SEIU suffered another blow when a member of SEIU-UHW’s negotiating committee – who also happens to be a member of SEIU-UHW’s Executive Board – resigned her positions in an act of protest and disgust. Here’s what Sophia Sims said in an email:

What I witnessed at the bargaining table was so serious that I have since stepped down from both the bargaining committee and the SEIU-UHW Executive Board, and have resigned from my position as an SEIU steward. How could I stay with SEIU when SEIU is so clearly in bed with Kaiser? All of us who witnessed SEIU's ratification vote at Kaiser over the last few weeks know that it was plagued with misconduct.

And here’s a video, produced by NUHW, where Sims describes her experiences during the bargaining and why she now supports NUHW:

Leaked SEIU Email Offers Exposé on Dave Regan

Remember the secret deal to create “political unity” between SEIU-UHW and SEIU Local 1021 in San Francisco? Ten days ago, Tasty posted a copy of the deal, which prompted coverage in a local newspaper and reactions by union members.

So what are officials at Local 1021 saying about the deal?

A source forwarded an internal email sent by three of Local 1021’s officials -- Chris Daly (Political Director and former S.F. County Supervisor), Larry Bradshaw (3rd Vice President) and Alysabeth Alexander (PAC Chair) -- to Local 1021’s SF COPE delegates. The COPE delegates are responsible for reviewing and approving the draft deal.

The email, sent June 7, offers a revealing glimpse at Local 1021 officials’ opinions about Dave Regan. Readers are no doubt aware of all the criticism of “Wall Street Dave” for cozying up to Bosses, selling out workers, and trying to crush democracy like an insect under his boot.

But what do officials at SEIU Local 1021 actually think about Regan? Check out the following excerpts from the email (Tasty posted the complete email below). A couple of quick notes on the text: “Roxanne” refers to Roxanne Sanchez, the president of SEIU Local 1021. “The Healthy SF loophole” refers to this act of political treachery carried out by SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan and Leon Chow.

earlier this year, our President began having discussions with the President of UHW, Dave Reagan, and the President of the International, Mary Kay Henry, to talk about the differences between our Locals. In these conversations, Roxanne forcefully and repeatedly pointed out the inconsistencies of our sister local in their organizational philosophy and political program. She pressed Reagan on how UHW’s engagement was compromising 1021’s position and progressive politics in San Francisco, where we have been organizing from the bottom up to build a political movement of the 99% that has been challenging corporate power…

During the discussions, 1021 clearly laid out our issues with UHW. We challenged their leadership for their position in opposing the Healthy SF loophole closure and for supporting pro-downtown candidates that support contracting out against candidates that support all workers in public sector and private health care and IHSS. We also challenged them on their anti-SF Labor Council stance.  It’s clear that their leadership was uncomfortable being challenged on these issues in front of their members who were not aware that these things had happened.  That’s not to say we’re turning UHW into a democratic union, but we must provide some framework for internal-SEIU accountability for what UHW has done and is doing in SF…

UHW’s political alliance with San Francisco business interests through the Alliance for Jobs has not just been an issue for Labor, it has been a problem for the entire progressive community. Since UHW’s trusteeship, victories for progressives in San Francisco have been few and far between. We don’t think that this timing is a coincidence. With Labor united, we face a very tough fight against downtown interests. With the City’s largest local on the other side, we stand hardly a chance.

That's quite a picture that union officials have painted of Dave Regan: undemocratic, pro-business, anti-SF labor council, anti-health reform, a supporter of subcontracting workers' jobs. It's no wonder that SEIU-UHW's rank-and-file members have given Regan the title of "Wall Street Dave." He's pretty much “the 1%”... and he's even got a $300,000-a-year salary to prove it! 

Here's the full text of the email: 

 Email from SEIU Local 1021 about SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan and Proposed Political Alliance 6-07-2012