Un upstart California healthcare union is in danger of folding following a decisive defeat to a bitter rival in a recent vote of Kaiser Permanente employees.
An estimated 61 percent of Kaiser workers voted in October to keep their affiliation in the Service Employees International Union, a Washington, D.C.-based organization of roughly 2.2 million members – about half of which are in healthcare jobs. The SEIU reportedly spent millions on the campaign against the National Union of Healthcare Workers, a 6,000-member, Oakland-based union formed last year by disgruntled SEIU members who had lobbied the Kaiser employees to switch allegiances.
According to the National Labor Relations Board, the vote was 18,290 in favor of the SEIU and 11,364 in favor of the NUHW.
NUHW members vowed to continue the fight in California to upend the SEIU, who they have charged with supplanting local union officials with SEIU insiders and ignoring the concerns of the rank-and-file. SEIU officials, meanwhile, say the acrimonious battle may have damaged labor relations for all California healthcare workers, and called on the NUHW to disband and mend fences.
“It’s time to admit you have failed,” David Regan, an SEIU official who took over trusteeship of an Oakland chapter after union members were ousted last year for alleged indiscretions, told the New York Times. “They need to look in the mirror and say, ‘It’s time for us to stop this thing.’ They have no future as a healthcare union in California or elsewhere.”
“Our organization’s leaders and people are committed to go forward,” NUHW President Sal Rosselli responded. “We’re absolutely confident that the election will be thrown out because of Kaiser’s and the SEIU’s illegal activity.”
Rosselli charged Kaiser with supporting the SEIU in the election by denying scheduled raises to NUHW supporters and granting SEIU organizers access to employees. Kaiser spokesman John E, Nelson denied the charges, saying the election was fair and that the healthcare network would accept the results once the NLRB certifies it.
In January 2009, the SEIU placed its Oakland–based, 150,000-member healthcare local in a trusteeship following charges that the local’s board was misusing member dues and violating members’ democratic rights. Several members of that board, including Rosselli, were removed – and they promptly formed the NUHW.
This past June, a federal judge in San Francisco reaffirmed an April court ruling awarding $1.57 million in damages to SEIU from Rosselli and 15 other former SEIU members who allegedly sought to sabotage the union while launching the NUHW.
“First they tried to secretly undermine and harm the union members they were sworn to represent and protect. Then, when they got caught, they tried to weasel out paying for what they did to us,” said Richard Cruz, a financial counselor at Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, Calif., following the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup.
Rosselli and others in the NUHW leadership have been on the losing end of at least three court rulings that deal with their battle with SEIU. In May, Rosselli and four assistants were removed from a $22 million SEIU-UHW union education fund after Alsup ruled that their involvement in the fund was “drenched in self-dealing.” And in June, the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board charged Rosselli and his assistants with several indiscretions, including failing to handle grievances, canceling contracts, stealing and destroying documents, threatening and intimidating staff, and funneling union money into a private account, while they were with SEIU-NUHW.
Rosselli’s supporters, meanwhile, have called him a charismatic leader who organized effectively, encouraged union democracy, negotiated fair contracts and won political influence. His fledgling union had won support from United Farmworkers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Steelworkers favorite Ed Sadlowski, but lost critical momentum when both the California Nurses Association and UNITE HERE negotiated new deals with the SEIU that included ending support for the NUHW.
Labor union experts have said the Kaiser vote could mean the end for the NUHW, which is still battling the SEIU in union votes at several California healthcare networks. Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian for the University of California, Santa Barbara who had supported the NUHW told the Times the vote was a “decisive defeat” for the small union.
“They’ll be marginal,” he said.