Battle Between SEIU and NUHW Is Largest Union Representation Election Since 1941: Union Hope and Fear Collide in California Health Care

Stereotypical union battles of the past were fought by burly working-class heroes on picket lines. Think of tough-looking guys marching along San Francisco’s waterfront in 1934. Their enemies were not just longshore bosses but a corrupt and management-friendly East Coast dockers union that sought to undercut their strike.

They shut down the port anyway, triggered a general strike, and ended up breaking away to form a new union under far greater rank-and-file control.

Seventy-six years later, Bay Area workers seeking a new union wear pink and blue hospital scrubs. It’s once again the kind of economy where most of the employed don’t want to take risks, but these workers are going all out to build the sort of union that can make a better life for subsequent generations.

CAFETERIA WARS

Their struggle for the hearts and minds of 44,000 co-workers in the Kaiser Permanente health system was most visible this month in hospital cafeterias across California. There, purple-clad members of the Service Employees (SEIU) and red-wearing supporters of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) gathered around rival information tables like sororities competing for new members during rush week.

Their recruitment activity was intense because ballots had just gone out in the biggest union representation vote since 1941.

At Kaiser’s big medical center in San Francisco, employees already “pledged” to one union or the other could be identified by the lanyards around their necks or which color they were wearing.

SEIU and NUHW stalwarts tend to stake out separate turf at lunchtime. They do little intermingling—except when lines form for the free food offered by SEIU.

Boxes of pricey pizza were piled high September 15, next to campaign flyers warning workers—falsely—that, if they vote to switch from SEIU to NUHW, they may lose 3 percent annual wage increases negotiated this summer by SEIU officials. Former SEIU President Andy Stern replaced the elected officers of United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) when he trusteed the local in January 2009.

The ousted former president of UHW, Sal Rosselli, stood next to the NUHW table, greeting a stream of rank-and-file members of every color and nationality. With a handshake, a hug, or a slap on the back, he urged them first to get a piece of pizza and then come back to talk. “After all,” he said with a grin, “your dues money paid for it!”

Highfives
from Kaiser nurses who joined NUHW in January. Photo: NUHW

NUHW filed petitions for a union representation election
this summer. Photo: NUHW

The bitter competition is consuming millions of dues dollars—most spent by SEIU. SEIU has also benefited from “in-kind” contributions from Kaiser, though the employer claims to be neutral, reinforcing the perception among disgruntled dues-payers that they are saddled with a company union.

JOBS DETERIORATE

NUHW supporters at Kaiser say workplace conditions and union representation have declined since their local was seized. Hundreds of UHW stewards and staff members resigned or were ousted. Whole stewards’ councils were depleted. Newly appointed SEIU “contract specialists”—who do full-time union work at Kaiser expense—have been much less effective than their predecessors purged for “disloyalty.”

In contract talks, national union staffers caved in to Kaiser’s demands for a pension plan giveback and weaker job security. A new contract was settled four months before the old one expired this fall, with little mobilization and no bargaining about local issues, as UHW had always done. According to NUHW, and a worried California Nurses Association (CNA), whose own Kaiser agreement is up next spring, the new contract opens the door for future health care cost-shifting.

All these issues are being debated in the blizzard of phone calling, mailing, and leafleting during three weeks of voting that ends October 4.

Julia Tecpa-Molina, a unit clerk in cardiology, wanted to be with her co-workers on their big “wear red” day, so she’s spending her day off helping them campaign, her two-year-old in tow. At the time of the trusteeship, Julia’s hospital had 1,600 UHW members. A subsequent “rebalancing” of the statewide workforce (Kaiser jargon for 1,500 job cuts), plus attrition, has reduced the local head count by nearly 10 percent, leading to job combinations, speed-up, understaffing, and reassignments that would have violated the old contract.

“Seniority doesn’t count for anything anymore,” she told me. “SEIU hasn’t helped us so we don’t believe in them.”

Julia’s friend, Gladys Cortez-Castillo, has been outside the hospital before work, leafleting at 6 a.m. She described understaffing in the ICU that leaves unit assistants badly overstretched. “We need something better to protect us, the kind of union it was before. With these people, we don’t have a chance,” she said, casting a contemptuous glance at out-of-state SEIU staffers busy serving pizza.

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The red T-shirt wearers far outnumbered the SEIU loyalists this day. Staffers at the SEIU table looked tense and beleaguered.

One arranged for me to interview the contract specialist for the hospital, who NUHW supporters say has been campaigning for SEIU on company time, a violation of federal law. Gabriella Padilla insists she only does so during breaks and lunch hour.

“I want somebody who has power,” Padilla explains, citing SEIU’s claimed North American membership of 2.2 million. “If NUHW wins, how are they going to get a contract?” She hints darkly that the rival union is “planning to go on strike” but “they don’t want to tell members that because it would turn them off.”

NUHW had just gotten a strong boost from rank-and-file nurses in the center. Even though CNA leaders are cooperating with SEIU on new organizing elsewhere, the nurses’ union bulletin board displayed NUHW campaign literature. In a letter, three nurses asked fellow RNs to wear red on Friday “to show our co-workers that we are standing with them…. We cannot afford to stand on the sidelines.”

The member-driven nature of NUHW’s low-budget campaign stands in sharp contrast to SEIU’s multi-million-dollar blitz. More than 1,000 staffers and stewards paid to take leave from their jobs elsewhere have been flown in from around the country. They are staying in hotels, driving rental cars, collecting per diems. Among the canvassers assigned to visit members at home are laid-off U.S. census workers and others with little or no union background, hired through a temp agency.

SEIU’s campaign coordinator in Roseville, north of Sacramento, introduces me to a steward in the women’s health department. That day her department had all trooped into the cafeteria in purple. Danielle Wanger seems eager to be done with all the “chaos and misinformation” of the last 18 months.

Hired by Kaiser in 2004, she became a steward only after the trusteeship. She sums up what may be the attitude of other newer employees. In her department, “we weren’t angry and don’t have many issues with management,” she told me. “Mostly, it’s the angry people who support NUHW. Those of us who are pretty content are not willing to risk change.”

NUHW’s rank-and-file committee at Roseville—which some jokingly call “the stewards council in exile”—was indeed angry the morning I visited. Scattered around the hospital was a flyer headlined: “STRIKE?!!! Are You Serious?!!!! In This Economy?? No Way!!!”

This anonymous production by someone on the SEIU side—the lead organizer disclaimed responsibility—invented fake quotes for eight NUHW activists, assertions like, “In order for change to happen, some blood must be shed” and “I want a union that will burn cars and be militant.”

Linda Antonelli, a 21-year employee, has taken two vacation days to help with the final push for NUHW. She reports SEIU has put all pending grievances on hold while its staff devotes every waking hour to the campaign, even leaving a discharge case in limbo.

“It didn’t used to be this way,” said Dina Taylor-West, a former steward with more than 20 years at Kaiser. “I was educated and knew the contract. It was enforced by a real union.” She recalled the pre-trusteeship days when there were monthly membership meetings in Roseville, held away from the hospital, after work, and not just restricted to stewards. New members were inducted, grievances were discussed, union strategy was debated. People came on their own time.

Today these gatherings are stewards-only affairs, held on the clock, courtesy of Kaiser or SEIU. “New members don’t have a clue about the contract,” Taylor-West says.

CRIMINALS?

At a nearby administrative center, 30 Kaiser staffers who schedule patients for surgery were wary of both unions. Mainly white and middle-class suburban women, they invited representatives to make presentations.

One question dealt with the $1.5 million verdict SEIU obtained in March against 16 former UHW leaders and staffers, including Marti Garza, now NUHW’s organizer in Roseville. SEIU has turned this civil liability into a criminal act, a “theft” of members’ dues money, as one SEIU official said to administrative workers. Marti quietly presented his side, pointing out that he was not in jail and was guilty only of “insubordination” to national union directives that were opposed by the workers who paid his salary.

Thanks to this lawsuit (which has cost SEIU members more than $10 million in legal fees thus far), Marti now owes SEIU $36,600—which is his current annual salary from NUHW. Starting in October, 25 percent of his pay will be garnished every month until he satisfies the judgment.

Impressed with his personal sacrifice and commitment to the members, the administrative workers voted as a group to support NUHW. They produced and distributed their own homemade “Vote NUHW” flyer and then called Garza to let him know what they had done. He couldn’t have been happier.

Steve Early is the author of Embedded with Organized Labor and The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, forthcoming from Haymarket Books this winter.