The Service Employees haven’t been looking too hot lately. Here’s a few of the high points: We all know that Quinn v. Harris had a huge impact on SEIU, especially in the healthcare industry. The blows continue to come. Local 925 labor filings recently revealed that their membership fell from approximately 7,000 to 4,000. That’s 42% of their membership that opted out of the union once they could. This explains why SEIU prefers to keep the option under wraps. A recent example comes out of California. In a complaint filed at the National Labor Relations Board, Guillermo Cornejo, a nurse at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center, reported that SEIU United Healthcare Workers West failed to notify him of his option to opt out of the union when he was hired in 2012. The Board has since filed an official charge against SEIU-UHW for engaging in coercive dues schemes. The Attorney General’s office filed their own lawsuit against SEIU Local 925 last week for failing to properly report political contributions from 2011 to 2015. The amount of the contributions in question totaled $635,000. SEIU Local 1000 is facing a bit of a road block themselves as one member, Ken Hamidi, is spearheading a campaign to decertify Local 1000 in favor of a different type of workforce association. Local 1000 currently represents nearly 100,000 state employees. Hamidi needs about 28,500 signatures to force a decertification vote. Hamidi says the process wouldn’t seem quite as daunting if he could get access to e-mails of the employees. He feels very confident that with the ability to reach the workforce, he can reach his goal. Typical of the one-sided process, unions are handed access to employee e-mails when they want to take control away from the company, but a member of a union who no longer wants representation doesn’t have the same privilege.
