SEIU took a kidney punch in January when 2300 members at Kaiser Permanente voted in favor of representation by the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Despite the overwhelming resources that Stern and company threw at the campaign, and months of delaying tactics, the Kaiser employees’ vote was a landslide victory for NUHW. 43,000 additional Kaiser workers will have a similar chance to vote when existing contracts expire this summer.
Good Samaritan Hospital employees in Los Angeles had the NLRB rule in their favor and order a new decertification election against the SEIU. Stern’s operatives resorted to bribes, and physical and verbal coercion in the long-running battle between the hospital workers and the union.
To compound SEIU’s west coast problems, it appears another California local is running amok. First, members of Local 221 filed a complaint with the Department of Labor citing irregularities in the July election of officers. When the president of the local, Frances Moore, resigned in January (for “personal” reasons), she was paid a six-figure severance and retained as a consultant. This infuriated the local membership, who appealed to Stern. Stern subsequently sent two henchmen to review the situation, counseling the local not to make any payments to Moore until after the review.
On the East Coast, the U.S. Attorney is reviewing calls for a probe into the possible law-breaking activities of SEIU executives Andy Stern and Anna Burger. At stake is whether or not the two high-profile Big Labor execs engaged in lobbying activity, having been delisted as lobbyists. The question is whether 20% of work time during any one quarter was devoted to lobbying. With Stern’s 28 2009 visits to the White House, and Burger’s 32, one would suspect it is likely.
And in this month’s most interesting SEIU news, it turns out that the SEIU (along with other unions) was behind an attack of the Tea Party movement, providing funding for the website http://theteappartyisover.org. Included in the attack strategy was an apparently large purchase of Google advertising. Although the SEIU tried to hide behind a trail of benignly named organizations, opensecrets.org confirmed the funding link.
