Lloyd Dean -- the CEO of Dignity Health and a close ally of SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan -- is courageously forging new ground in the gold-plated
gig economy.
Earlier this
week, Tasty
described how Dean works full-time as the CEO of the US’s third-largest
health system, Dignity Health… but finds enuf time to pocket $350,000 a
year for sitting on Wells Fargo’s
board of directors.
Well… it
turns out Dean holds down a number of other side-gigs, too.
He happens
to sit on the board of directors of McDonald’s
Corporation, which is one of the targets of SEIU’s Fight
for $15 campaign.
Wonder if Regan’s
infamous gag
clause, which "Wall Street" Dave signed with Dean and other CEOs, prohibits SEIU
from discussing Dean’s sky-high salary?
How much does McDonald's pay Dean?
Approximately quarter million dollars a year in cash and stocks for attending board
meetings. Thus far, he’s assembled thousands of shares of McDonald’s stock for himself
and the “Dean Family Trust,” according to SEC records.
Dean also
sits on the board of Navigant Consulting,
Inc., a Chicago-based management consulting firm, which pays Dean $200,000
a year in cash and stock.
Recently, Dean gave up his seat on two other corporations’ board of directors. Those companies
happen to pay far less than Wells Fargo, McDonald’s, and Navigant.
Fight for $15
Last year, he resigned his board seat at Premier, Inc.,
which paid him only $50,000 a year in cash.
Chump change, right?
Premier, based
in Charlotte, NC, provides performance-improvement consulting and group
purchasing to hospitals and nursing homes across the US.
He also ditched
his seat at Cytori Therapeutics,
Inc., a San Diego-based biotechnology company where Dean was the Chairman
of the Board. During Dean’s last year at the company, he pocketed 16,030
stock options, 10,550 shares of restricted stock, and $33,625 in cash,
according to the company’s SEC filings.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testifying in Congress last week.
One of SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan’s closest CEO buddies -- Lloyd Dean, CEO of Dignity
Health -- is neck-deep in the
scandal that’s rocking Wells Fargo.
In fact, Dean -- who serves on Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors -- may have
used insider information at the bank to improperly line his pockets, according
to SEC records not been previously reported.
The episode
offers another glimpse at the harmful effects of Regan’s collaborationist
approach with corporations.
Headquartered
in San Francisco, Dignity Health is the fifth largest health system in the
nation and is the largest hospital company in California. In 2014, Dignity paid
Lloyd Dean $8.1 million, according to the company’s federal tax returns.
Lloyd Dean's 2014 Compensation at Dignity Health: IRS Form 990
Dean, in
addition to his full-time job at Dignity, has plenty of time to work well-paid gigs
on the side … like serving on Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors.
At the bank,
Dean headed the “Corporate Responsibility Committee,” charged with monitoring
“customer service and complaint matters,” at the same time that Wells Fargo was
quietly setting up 2 million phony accounts for customers, according to proxy
statements cited by Fortune Magazine. The fake accounts -- which forced bank
customers to pay service fees on debit cards, credit cards, and other accounts
they never authorized -- boosted Wells Fargo’s profits.
A review of board records in Wells Fargo’s
annual proxy filings of the past few years suggests that, even as scrutiny of
Wells Fargo’s consumer practices was ramping up outside the bank… officials at
the highest levels of the company, who were most responsible, did little—that
is, the absolute minimum—to address the bank’s growing problem.
None of that, though, or the aftermath,
appears to have curtailed the payday of the board members involved…
The bank’s board formed the corporate
responsibility committee in 2011. It was first headed by Lloyd Dean, another
Wells Fargo board member, who now heads the committee that oversees
compensation. Dean was paid $346,027 in cash and stock last year.
Dean’s role as
chair of Wells Fargo’s compensation committee is important to note given that
the bank’s aggressive sales quotas and financial incentive programs are at the
heart of the fraud it perpetrated on millions of customers.
In recent
weeks, Wells Fargo agreed to pay more than $200 million in fines. Some
executives may face criminal charges. Meanwhile, Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf was forced to give back $41
million in compensation due to public pressure.
But don’t
cry for Stumpf.
He’s still
sitting on $247 million in Wells Fargo stock, according to SEC records.
Earlier this
week, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney
(D-NY) ripped Stumpf a new one during a hearing on Capitol Hill. She presented
evidence that in October 2013, Stumpf appeared to have used insider
information to sell $13 million of his own shares of Wells Fargo stock just
before the bank’s fraud became publicly known.
Why is the
timing of Stumpf’s stock sell-off significant?
During Stumpf’s
testimony before a Senate panel on September 20, 2016, he said he first learned of his
bank’s fraud in “late 2013.”
Here’s a
video of Rep. Maloney interrogating Stumpf.
Did other
fatcat insiders dump their stock at the same time?
What about,
umm, Dignity Health CEO Lloyd Dean?
According to
SEC disclosure forms, Dean carried out the same stock-dumping transactions just
a handful of days after Stumpf did.
In early
November of 2013, Dean sold Wells Fargo stock worth more than $520,000. Dean
had acquired the 12,330 shares through a special stock purchase option program
available to the company’s Board of Directors.
One of Dean's SEC Forms 4
In March 2016,
Dean and his family trust sold another $327,051 worth of Wells Fargo stock,
according to SEC records.
See below
for copies of Dean’s and Stumpf's SEC Forms 4.
What’s SEIU-UHW
President Dave Regan’s relationship to Lloyd Dean?
Dave “Wall
Street” Regan, who favors “partnerships” and secret backroom deals with CEOs,
has worked hand-in-glove with Dean for years.
In 2008-09, Regan
secretly conspired with Dean to carry out SEIU’s trusteeship against
California’s militant healthcare workers union, then headed by Sal Rosselli.
In an
apparent payback, Regan then delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to Dean
by negotiating massive wage and benefit cuts affecting SEIU-UHW’s 14,000
members at Dignity hospitals in California.
In 2010, for
example, Regan eliminated SEIU-UHW members’ defined-benefit pension plan,
delivering Dignity a
$217 million windfall, according to the company’s financial statements.
In 2012,
Regan allowed Dignity to
freeze SEIU-UHW members’ wages and to implement more benefit cuts... even
though the company was making massive profits.
In 2015 and 2016,
Regan negotiated more cuts for workers.
SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan
And in 2014,
Regan famously signed a secret partnership deal with the California Hospital Association, Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente, and other
corporations. The deal, which was designed to institute “a new model of labor
relations,” included bans on worker strikes and implemented a gag clause that
blocked SEIU-UHW and its members from supporting any regulatory action,
legislation, or ballot initiative adverse to the interests of Dignity Health
and the California hospital industry.
The secret
pact’s provisions, which were eventually made
public through litigation, also prohibited SEIU-UHW -- California’s largest
healthcare workers union -- from “raising concern about... executive
compensation in health care."
With the
stroke of his pen, Regan silenced SEIU-UHW and its members from voicing any
criticism of Dean’s outrageously high salary at Dignity Health... not to
mention his apparently gold-plated insider trading at Wells Fargo.
The California Hospital Association (CHA)
has taken SEIU-UHW to court… again.
This time, CHA
is trying to recover tens of millions of dollars that SEIU-UHW has locked away
inside a secret “partnership” organization, according to records obtained from Sacramento
County Superior Court. (Below is a full copy.)
On October
14, CHA’s and SEIU-UHW’s attorneys will face off in a Sacramento courthouse.
Here’s
what’s happening.
When
SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan and CHA’s Duane Dauner signed their secret
partnership deal in 2014, they also agreed to set up and finance a secret
new organization to carry out their joint projects.
The new
organization’s first priority was to help SEIU-UHW convince politicians to steer
$6 billion a year in new Medicaid funds to California’s giant hospital corporations.
Dave Regan and Duane Dauner
If SEIU-UHW had
succeeded in this task (they didn’t), then the hospital CEOs would have allowed
SEIU-UHW to unionize 30,000 of their employees… but only as long as the workers
were banned from striking, forced into cheap labor contracts, and silenced by a
massive gag
clause.
The covert
partnership organization -- ironically named “Caring for Californians” by its founders -- was funded with $50
million that Regan and Dauner diverted from their treasuries in 2014.
With
millions in its bank count, “Caring
for Californians” leased office space in Sacramento, hired Peter Ragone
as its Executive Director, hired attorneys and staff, etc. The organization was
soon spending $40,000 a month in operating expenses, according to court filings
by the CHA.
For a time,
things were going swimmingly for Wall Street Dave. Fantasies of his
class-collaborationist partnership danced through his head as he performed
late-night lap dances for some of California’s wealthiest corporate CEOs.
Peter Ragone, CFC's Executive Director
By November
of 2015, however, Dave’s partnership had exploded in a fiery display that lit
up California’s skies. The partnership was dead!
At the time
of the partnership’s demise, “Caring for Californians” still had $34 million in
unspent cash sitting in its bank account.
And that’s
what the latest lawsuit is all about. The $34 million.
Under the
terms of Regan and Dauner’s secret partnership deal, the $34 was supposed to be
returned to CHA and SEIU-UHW on January 1, 2016. However, Regan -- in an
apparent fit of vindictiveness against his former pin-striped pals -- is
refusing to return the money to either organization.
According to
CHA’s lawsuit, Regan has vetoed any return of the money to both CHA and
SEIU-UHW.
How?
“Caring for
Californians” is run by an eight-person Board of Directors, with equal numbers
of seats filled by CHA and SEIU-UHW. Regan and Dauner are co-chairs of the
board. Since January of 2016, says CHA, Regan has used his four votes (one of
them is SEIU-UHW staffer Arianna
Jimenez) to block every proposal to return the $34 million.
So what’s
happening to the money?
It’s simply swirling
down the drain, says CHA.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent CHA legal filing,
which refers to “Caring for Californians” by its initials “CFC.” The term "Code of Conduct" refers to the secret partnership deal signed in 2014.
“On December 31, 2015, the Code of Conduct
terminated pursuant to its terms. Since that time, CFC has had no ongoing work,
and neither CHA, UHW, nor any CFC Director has made any efforts to initiate new
endeavors. Nonetheless, CFC has continued to spend approximately $40,000 each
month on operating expenses for resources and services it has not been using.
These are not only unnecessary expenditures, but they also decrease the amount
available for redistribution to both CHA and UHW as provided by the Code of
Conduct.” (p. 3)
Interesting,
right?
SEIU-UHW's Arianna Jimenez
Regan is so vindictive
he’s willing to piss millions of dollars of SEIU-UHW members’ money down the
drain to get back at CHA.
How much
money do SEIU-UHW members stand to lose? According to the CHA:
“As of September 1, 2016, the CFC has
approximately $34 million in its accounts that is not currently encumbered.
Pursuant to the terms of the Code of Conduct, approximately $27.2 million would
be returned to CHA and approximately $6.8 million would be returned to UHW.” (p. 4)
What’s CHA
asking the judge to do?
CHA’s
lawsuit asks the judge to force SEIU-UHW into binding arbitration so it
can recover its $27.2 million. Plus, it wants SEIU-UHW to pay all of CHA’s
attorneys fees.
If history
is a judge, it looks like SEIU-UHW’s members will be footing the bill for yet another
idiotic blunder by Regan.
Here’s a
copy of CHA’s suit filed on September 6, 2016:
Two leaders
at UNITE HERE have penned a sharp critique of SEIU.
The piece,
entitled “Labor’s
Neoliberal Caucus” in Jacobin
Magazine, criticizes SEIU for pushing a boss-friendly, “neoliberal” style
of unionism that’s undermining the US labor movement.
The authors --
Warren Heyman (an international vice
president of UNITE HERE) and Andrew
Tillett-Saks (the organizing director for UNITE HERE Local 217) -- define “neoliberal
unionism” as “a unionism that espouses collaboration with corporations instead
of conflict and upholds free-market capitalism as reconcilable with labor’s
interests.”
According to
the article, the “modern wave” of this boss-friendly unionism “is
rooted in SEIU and its former president Andy
Stern’s push for neoliberal unionism in the 2000s.”
Stern, who made
backroom deals with CEOs as SEIU’s president and also tried to stamp out internal
critics through trusteeships, has continued walking down the same ideological path since
his retirement.
Only days after retiring, Stern accepted tens of thousands of shares
of stock and a
fully paid job from Ron Perelman,
a billionaire corporate raider who’s one of the world’s richest men. Perelman has showered Stern with gifts in apparent exchange for sweetheart labor deals that Stern negotiated from SEIU's Purple Palace in Washington DC, including a deal with one of Perelman's many companies, AlliedBarton.
Here’s an
excerpt from Heyman’s and Tillett-Saks’ article regarding Stern’s role in
pushing neoliberal unionism:
Stern explicitly and aggressively pushed the
labor movement to adopt a “collaborationist” approach towards capital;
according to the Stern ideology, workers and unions don’t have to fight
corporations, just build “relationships” with them and cajole them into a
mutually beneficial partnership.
In this spirit, Stern and SEIU amassed a
lengthy record of striking deals with corporations that sold out workers’
ability to fight in exchange for promises of union recognition… SEIU expanded,
but what expanded was a neutered shell of a labor movement, full of members
with preposterous contracts and little ability to fight for better.
Stern is gone but his ideological legacy
remains… From embracing free-market capitalism to embracing employers to
embracing their political representatives, the political and intellectual
lineage is clear.
SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is clearly one of Stern’s disciples.
Regan
famously inked a secret deal with the California
Hospital Association that banned strikes, forced workers into
pre-negotiated contracts with stripped-down wages and benefits, and imposed a
gag clause that blocked SEIU members from criticizing their employers or mentioning
their CEOs’ sky-high salaries.
On Labor Day
of 2014, Regan famously told NBC-LA TV News that the idea of strikes and “adversarial
relationships” between workers and corporations is “outdated.” Instead, says Regan,
unions must “collaborate” with corporate CEOs to create a new “teamwork”
economy.
Below, see a two-minute
excerpt from Regan’s NBC TV interview in which he describes his vision of
SEIU's idea of "21st century" unionism.
Heyman and Tillett-Saks
conclude their article by issuing a call to arms to US workers and unions, who
they say must confront and battle SEIU inside the US labor movement.
The proliferation of this model of unionism
would spell disaster for the American labor movement. Our movement’s success
depends on how widely and how militantly we can organize workers to fight
corporate power and the 1 percent, not embrace them.
Union members and leaders must do everything
in their power to halt the march of neoliberal unionism, before they march the
labor movement straight into its grave.
What does "neoliberal unionism" look like? Check out this 2-minute excerpt from Regan’s interview with NBC TV News on Labor Day, 2014:
In 2015, a
unit of workers at Dignity's Northridge Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles left SEIU-UHW after requesting an NLRB election
to dump the union. The workers include clinical lab scientists, social workers
(MSWs and LCSWs), radiation therapists, and nuclear medicine technologists.
According to
NLRB records, the workers filed a formal “decertification” petition with NLRB Region 31
in Los Angeles. After SEIU-UHW officials realized they’d get trounced in an election,
they decided to threw in the towel and let the workers go without an election --
what’s called “disclaiming interest in the unit,” in NLRB parlance.
Why did the
Dignity workers bolt from SEIU-UHW?
They say SEIU-UHW
never did anything for them... and wouldn’t even return workers' phone calls.
The workers’
action is especially embarrassing for SEIU-UHW Vice President Stan
Lyles, who formerly worked at Northridge Hospital Medical Center. Lyes tells
everyone he’s got “rockstar” status with his former co-workers at Northridge.
Not quite,
Stan.
But... if you
really want to see a rockstar performance by Stan, check out the following video of
Stan attacking SEIU for its undemocratic practices in 2008.
Lyles,
speaking at a meeting of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), attacks SEIU
officials for making back-room deals with CEOs -- including a secret
deal with Tenet Healthcare to allow
the company to subcontract the jobs of more than 10% of SEIU-UHW's members.
That's one of the dirty moves that prompted SEIU-UHW members to publicly criticize Andy Stern and SEIU in 2007 and 2008, which then caused Stern to remove SEIU-UHW's elected leaders through a trusteeship in 2009.
After imposing the trusteeship, SEIU officials gave Lyles a big purple paycheck to abandon his principles and pledge
his allegiance to Andy Stern, Dave Regan, and the other Purple Palace
officials whom he had so sharply criticized.
Lyles, who
had aggressively opposed the trusteeship, quickly changed his tune.
Ain’t it interesting what a boatload of cash will due to the moral compass of some
people?
Perhaps that’s why Lyles has earned the nickname of “Mr.
Integrity.”
Here’s the
video of Lyles attacking SEIU in 2008, before he received his big payoff from Andy Stern:
Dave Regan: "I love the Boss and the Boss loves me"
Dignity Healthcare workers’ "bullshit meters" are jumping off the charts in the wake of SEIU-UHW
officials’ recent announcement that they “won” a great new labor contract at Dignity.
Here’s what’s
happening:
Dignity
Healthcare employs approximately 14,000
SEIU-UHW members across California. It’s the union’s second-largest employer after
Kaiser Permanente.
Soon after SEIU’s trusteeship in 2009, trustee Dave
Regan began negotiating massive benefit cuts and pay freezes for Dignity workers.
In 2010, Regan and his lieutenant Hal
Ruddick famously eliminated workers’ defined-benefit pension plan and
then lied
to workers about the cuts. The truth was later revealed when Dignity's quarterly financial statement detailed how the company pocketed a $217
million windfall due to SEIU-UHW’s cuts.
In 2012,
Regan allowed Dignity to freeze
SEIU-UHW members’ wages and implement more benefit cuts... even though the
company was making massive profits.
Last year,
SEIU-UHW officials accepted even more cuts -- this time to Dignity workers’
health benefits.
Then, at the
beginning of 2016, SEIU-UHW returned to the bargaining table to negotiate pay
increases for its members. Instead, Dignity demanded even more cuts from Regan!
“Why not?,”
Dignity execs undoubtedly said to themselves. "Regan is the gift that keeps on giving."
This year’s negotiations,
which were supposed to conclude by April, dragged on as Dignity execs demanded a growing
list of concessions.
Here’s how SEIU-UHW
recently described Dignity's proposed cuts to the press:
Wage freeze;
“Slashing” workers’
already-reduced retirement benefits by “up to 25%;”
Subcontracting
SEIU-UHW members’ jobs
And here’s what
one SEIU-UHW member at Dignity told the Long
Beach Signal Tribune and the Long
Beach Press-Telegraph earlier this month:
According to a media release from the
Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West
(SEIU-UHW), Dignity Health has proposed to reduce retirement benefits up to 25
percent and desires to outsource jobs to companies that offer low wages…
[SEIU-UHW member] Jay Villarreal himself
said that he was one of the protestors stationed outside the hospital with a
bullhorn. The 53-year-old from the Long Beach area has already personally felt
the sting of a wage freeze. Villarreal said he has not had a raise in four
years.
“And the way the contract is being stated by
Dignity Health, I won’t see one for an additional three years…enough is enough
really,” Villarreal concluded with a snicker. “Seven years!”
So what did
SEIU-UHW do in the face of Dignity’s demands? Strike?
Nope.
Hal Ruddick
Since Regan
parachuted into California in 2009, SEIU-UHW has conducted virtually zero
strikes.
Why?
In September
of 2014, Regan famously told NBC news that strikes are “outdated.” Instead, he prefers a bold new strategy of “collaboration” with the Boss for “win-win” solutions. That’s the approach that Regan calls “21st Century
unionism.”
Hmmm.
Ya
gotta wonder what Dignity workers feel about the last seven years of Regan’s “collaboration” with their multi-millionaire boss. Doesn't sound too "win-win" for workers, right?
Two weeks ago, SEIU-UHW
officials suddenly announced they’d finally “won” a wonderful
new contract for Dignity workers without any strikes or fight. Here's how they announced it on SEIU-UHW's website:
August 16, 2016
Next,
SEIU-UHW officials announced they refuse to provide a copy of their wonderful tentative
agreement to Dignity workers in advance of workers’ ratification vote.
SEIU-UHW will only provide a single copy inside the voting room on the day of
the voting.
Here’s the
latest on SEIU International’s trusteeship
of SEIU Local 73, which
represents 25,000 public-sector workers in Illinois and Northwestern Indiana.
Soon after the
trusteeship was imposed earlier this month, Matthew Brandon -- who was removed from his position as Local 73’s Secretary-Treasurer
-- accused SEIU officials of conducting a “hostile takeover” of Local 73.
Brandon “threatened to file a federal discrimination lawsuit to reverse the
international’s installation of emergency trustees,” according to an
article in the Chicago Sun Times.
Brandon told
the newspaper: “I don’t view this as a trusteeship. I view it as a hostile
takeover.”
SEIU
officials say they were forced to impose the trusteeship because of a dysfunctional
relationship between Brandon and Local 73’s president, Christine Boardman.
However,
Brandon told the Sun Times that a top SEIU official was the person who actually
sparked the tensions between himself and Boardman by asking him to carry out a
secret “stealth” campaign against Boardman.
In June of
2014, Brandon says a Vice President at SEIU International asked him to deal
with a personal issue that was affecting Boardman’s job performance, according
to the Sun Times. Here’s an excerpt from the Sun Times article:
“I proceeded in that process as stealthily
as I could until Christine eventually found about it. That’s when our
relationship was destroyed. She saw me as someone attacking her instead of
trying to help her,” he said.
Then, Brandon added, the international
“backed away from me and accused me of everything that was wrong in the local.
These people don’t know what can of worms they’ve opened here. The members are
absolutely furious.”
Brandon, who is black, charged that SEIU
“discriminates against African-American males” and that he would “be able to
prove that.”
Eliseo
Medina, who was installed as the
trustee of Local 73, issued an emailed statement that offered no direct
response to Brandon’s explosive charges…
“As late as Monday, I sent an email to the
international general counsel Judy Scott.
I told her I was returning to work from an illegal suspension Christine
[Boardman] imposed on July 5. Scott said I was insubordinate and not following
her directions. Then, she started issues about what was happening the union,” said Brandon.
Nice quote from Judy Scott, right? "Follow my orders, muthafuka!"
So who’s the
SEIU International Vice President whom Brandon refers to?
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