In what will be the largest union representation election since the 1940s, health care 45,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente may soon enter the ballot box. If the NLRB agrees with the petition, these SEIU members will be offered the opportunity to switch to the NUHW. The election (barring further blocking charges) could occur sometime after August. The NUHW has done yeoman’s work to bring this election to reality, as it required a minimum of 13,500 signatures from 350 different work locations in one of the largest states in the country. By all accounts, their efforts far exceeded the minimum. The SEIU ethics track record received another ding when it was discovered that Patrick Gaspard, the former SEIU Local 1199 political director turned Obama political director, failed to disclose a $40,000 payout by SEIU on government disclosure forms. Copying another move from the playbook of revisionist historians, the SEIU funded a new coffee table book that “substitutes the ideal for the real, and reads like an extended SEIU press release,” according to labor insider Steve Early. In typical fashion, those commissioned to produce the book were/are SEIU insiders, who made out quite nicely on the project. In his review, Early wonders how much dues money was squandered on the glossy PR piece.
