Monday, February 28, 2011 by
The Guardian/UK
Wisconsin Is Making the Battle Lines Clear in America's Hidden Class War
The brazen choices of the Republican governor shows the real ideology behind attacks on unions – in the US and beyond
by Gary Younge
You can tell a great deal about a nation's anxieties and aspirations by the discrepancy between reality and popular perception. Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%).
Similarly, a Mori poll in Britain in 2002 revealed that more than a third of the country thought there were too many immigrants. Little wonder. The mean estimate was that immigrants comprise 23% of the country; the actual number was about 4%.
Protest against cuts in Minnesota social programs
Broadly speaking, these inconsistencies do not reflect malice or wilful ignorance but people's attempts to make sense of the world they experience through the distorting filters of media representation, popular prejudice and national myths. "The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe," wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."
When it comes to class, Americans have long seen themselves as potentially rich and perpetually middling. A Pew survey in 2008 revealed that 91% believe they are either middle class, upper-middle class or lower-middle class. Relatively few claim to be working class or upper class, intimating more of a cultural aspiration than an economic relationship. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as "rich", 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would "ever be rich".
But trends and ongoing events are forcing a reappraisal of that self-image. Social mobility has stalled; wages have been stagnant for a generation. It is in this light that the growing resistance to events in Wisconsin must be understood. The hardline Republican governor, Scott Walker, has pledged to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions and cut local government workers' health benefits and pension entitlements.
As the prospect of becoming rich diminishes, many are simply trying not to become poor. Inequality of income and wealth has been more readily accepted in the US because equality of opportunity has long been assumed. The absence of the latter raises serious questions about the existence of the former. This tension brought thousands to the streets in all 50 states to support the Wisconsin unions last weekend.
For Walker's measures to pass, a certain number of local senators must be present in the chamber for the vote. To prevent that happening, the entire Democratic delegation fled the state and is refusing to return until Walker agrees to negotiate. Meanwhile, thousands of pro-union demonstrators have descended on the state capital to protest, sparking solidarity rallies nationwide.
Polls suggest the public is siding with the unions locally and nationally. A survey last week showed 53% against cutting benefits and pay for government workers and 61% opposed to removing collective bargaining. Even conservative polls suggest a majority in Wisconsin is opposed to Walker's attempt to eliminate collective bargaining.
Coming so soon after Republican electoral victories at federal and state level, Walker might have anticipated an easier ride for his agenda than this. After all, membership of unions is at an all-time low and public support for them does not fare much better. Moreover, support for unions ordinarily falls when unemployment rises. But these are no ordinary times. For if organised labour has fallen out of favour, the illusion that you can make it on your own is not far behind. A Pew survey in 2008 – before the banking system imploded – showed that fewer Americans than at any time in 50 years thought they were moving forward in life. The number of those who don't believe you can get ahead by working hard has doubled in 10 years. Half the country thinks its best days are behind it. While many may question the role of the unions, few believe firing 12,000 government workers, as Walker has pledged to do, is the answer.
Walker's case is as predictable as it is weak. Government workers, he claims, have higher pay and better benefits than others in a bloated state that must slim down if it is to keep running. This is hardly true. Accounting for age and education, US local government employees earn 4% less than their private sector counterparts.
Yes, the shortfall in pensions is real. But if the political will existed, calamity could be avoided with a fairly modest increase in the budget allocation. Union members do generally enjoy better benefits. That's the whole point of being in a union: to improve your living standards through collective action. And that is precisely why Republicans like Walker want to crush them.
His agenda has nothing to do with redressing a fiscal imbalance and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to deliver a killer blow to organised labour. If fixing the budget deficit were really Walker's priority, he would not have waved through $140m in tax breaks for multinationals or refused to take federal funds for transport or broadband development. Like 10 other states, he might even have raised taxes progressively.
None of these contradictions are particular to Wisconsin. Similar stories could be told as far away as Ireland and as nearby as Indiana, where Democrats also fled the state to defeat a union-bashing bill. Nor are they coming exclusively from the hard right. Democrats in the US and social democrats around Europe are attacking unions too, albeit with less relish. What Wisconsin does offer is a transparent illustration of the ideological sophistry and political mendacity driving these attacks.
But having started this fight in such a brazen manner, Walker has little option but to pursue it to its bitter end. That is why it has taken on national significance. Faced with an existential threat, the labour movement has broadened its horizons and galvanised a pluralistic, national opposition. That is a precondition for success but by no means a guarantee.
Last weekend's demonstrations do not necessarily reflect a new sense of class consciousness, but they do suggest the potential for it. The idea of a class system where only a handful can ever be truly wealthy intrudes awkwardly on a culture rooted in notions of self-advancement, personal reinvention and rugged individualism, even if it is closer to reality. Old habits die hard. The weekend protests were organised under the banner "Save the American Dream".
Democratic politicians, funded by both unions and corporations, pretend not to take sides, casting the national conversation not in terms of bosses and workers or wages and profits but of rich and poor.
The problem with this, explains Michael Zweig, the director of the centre for the study of working-class life at the State University of New York, is that "most people want to be rich and most of them don't know what rich is. If you put class in terms of power, you start to get to the source of the problem."
Leaders like Walker are making it clear which side of the class divide they stand on. A growing number of Americans, it seems, have begun to understand that this is precisely the problem and are discovering the source of their own power.
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The Rumble of the People
By RALPH NADER
The large demonstrations at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin are driven by a middle class awakening to the spectre of its destruction by the corporate reactionaries and their toady Governor Scott Walker.
For years the middle class has watched the plutocrats stomp on the poor while listening to the two parties regale the great middle class, but never mentioning the tens of millions of poor Americans. And for years, the middle class was shrinking due significantly to corporate globalization shipping good-paying jobs overseas to repressive dictatorships like China. It took Governor Walker's legislative proposal to do away with most collective bargaining rights for most public employee unions to jolt people to hit the streets.
Republicans take rigged elections awash in corporatist campaign cash seriously. When they win, they aggressively move their corporate agenda, unlike the wishy-washy Democrats who flutter weakly after a victory. Republicans mean business. A ram rod wins against a straw all the time.
Governor Walker won his election, along with other Republicans in Wisconsin, on mass-media driven Tea Party rhetoric. His platform was deceitful enough to get the endorsement of the police, and firefighters unions, which the latter have now indignantly withdrawn.
These unions should have known better. The Walker Republicans were following the Reagan playbook. The air traffic controllers union endorsed Reagan in 1980. The next year he fired 12,000 of them during a labor dispute. (This made flying unnecessarily dangerous.)
Then Reagan pushed for tax cuts—primarily for the wealthy—which led to larger deficits to turn the screws on programs benefitting the people. Reagan, though years earlier opposed to corporate welfare, not only maintained these taxpayer subsidies but created a government deficit, over eight years, that was double that of all the accumulated deficits from George Washington to Jimmy Carter.
Maybe the unions that endorsed Walker will soon realize that not even being a "Reagan Democrat" will save them from being losers under the boot of the corporate supremacists.
The rumble of the people in Madison illustrates the following:
1. There is an ideological plan driving these corporatists. They create "useful crisis" and then hammer the unorganized people to benefit the wealthy classes. Governor Walker last year gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations. This fiscal year's deficit is $137 million. Note this oft-repeated dynamic. President Obama caved to the Minority party Republicans in Congress last December by going along with the deficit-deepening extension of the huge dollar volume tax cuts for the rich. Now the Republicans want drastic cuts in programs that help the poor.
2. Whatever non-union or private union workers, who are giving ground or losing jobs, think of the sometimes better pay and benefits of unionized public employees, they need to close ranks without giving up their opposition to government waste. For corporate lobbyists and their corporate governments are going after all collective bargaining rights for all workers and they want to further weaken The National Labor Relations Board.
3. Whenever corporations and government want to cut workers' incomes, the corporate tax abatements, bloated contracts, handouts and bailouts should be pulled into the public debate. What should go first?
4. For the public university students in these rallies, they might ponder their own tuition bills and high interest loans, compared to students in Western Europe, and question why they have to bear the burden of massive corporate welfare payouts—foodstamps for the rich. What should go first?
5. The bigger picture should be part of the more localized dispute. Governor Walker also wants weaker safety and environmental regulations, bargain-basement sell-outs of state public power plants and other taxpayer assets.
6. The mega-billionaire Koch brothers are in the news. They are bankrolling politicians and rump advocacy groups and funding media campaigns in Wisconsin and all over the country. Koch Industries designs and builds facilities for the natural gas industry. Neither the company nor the brothers like the publicity they deserve to get every time their role is exposed. Always put the spotlight on the backroom boys.
7. Focusing on the larger struggle between the people and the plutocracy should be part and parcel of every march, demonstration or any other kind of mass mobilization. The signs at the Madison rallies make the point, to wit—"2/3 of Wisconsin Corporations Pay No Taxes," "Why Should Public Workers Pay For Wall Street's Mess?", "Corporate Greed Did the Deed."
8. Look how little energy it took for these tens of thousands of people to sound the national alarm for hard-pressed Americans. Just showing up is democracy's barn raiser. This should persuade people that a big start for a better America can begin with a little effort and a well-attended rally. Imagine what even more civic energy could produce!
Showing up lets people feel their potential power to subordinate corporatism to the sovereignty of the people. After all, the Constitution's preamble begins with "We the People," not "We the Corporations." In fact, the founders never put the word "corporation" or "company" in our constitution which was designed for real people.
As for Governor Walker's projected two-year $3.6 billion deficit, read what Jon Peacock of the respected nonprofit Wisconsin Budget Project writes at:
http://www.wisconsinbudgetproject.org about how to handle the state budget without adopting the draconian measures now before the legislature.
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The National Costs of Crushing Workers in Wisconsin
By LAURA FLANDERS
So that's what they mean by from welfare to work. First you go force the poorest Americans into the workforce, then you go after their bargaining power. Wisconsin has long been the eye of this storm.
"We have an environment in Wisconsin in which any poor family can climb out of the despair of poverty and pursue the American dream."
So said former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, singing his own praises to the Heritage Foundation back in the early '90s. By the time Bill Clinton ended the federal welfare program in '96, Wisconsin's W-2 program had already cut off AFDC entitlements and forced poor moms to work for benefits. That pushed thousands of poor women into the labor market. Average wages were around $7.00 an hour; homelessness rose, as did the number of children in foster care; Milwaukee's black infant mortality rate went up 37%, and as soon as the 90's bubble burst, unemployment and poverty swelled.
Thompson called his policy "compassionate"-- and that's the problem. It redefined what was morally acceptable to do to poor people, and with a whole lot of help from strategically funded media, the same reasoning wormed its way into the national mind. Democrat Bill Clinton boasted about "ending welfare as we know it," and signed a brutal '96 bill, casting it as doing RIGHT by the poor. Now that's the same language being used to take down the unions.
Inside the dark Victorian mansion of the Bradley Foundation in benighted Milwaukee, there must be smiles all around. The same ideologically-driven outfit that paid for the task force that devised Thompson's welfare plan is now backing Walker's drive to criminalize collective bargaining.
In fact, as Wisconsin journalists reported with alarm two years ago, the CEO of the Bradley Foundation, Michael Grebe, was Scott Walker's campaign chair and the head of his transition team. Bradley has long treated Wisconsin as its radical policy science lab. It must be itching to carve another notch in its community-destroying cane.
Paying for politicians is child's play. To crib from the debt peddlers: pushing right wing policy is costly. Actually pacifying workers? Priceless.
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The Strategy Behind the Budget Battles
By ALLAN J. LICHTMAN
Republican responses to budget challenges nationally and in Wisconsin come together as part of a long-standing strategy to destroy institutions that allegedly sustain the American left. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republicans in the state legislature have targeted teachers' unions.
Republicans budget-cutters in Congress have targeted Planned Parenthood, the Public Broadcasting Corporation, and the Legal Services Corporation, among other groups. Their budget inflicts little or no pain on Republican-leaning organizations such as the agribusinesses that garner most farm payments or the oil companies that receive billions in special tax subsidies.
The GOP first elaborated this strategy in a 1999 memo on priorities for the new millennium that I discovered in the papers of former Republican allanRepresentative Dick Armey of Texas. A copy of the memo can be found in the photo essay of my book, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.
The memo outlined strategies for "defunding the left" by eliminating "sources of hard currency for the Democratic Party" following President Ronald Reagan's "model for cutting off the flow of hard currency to the Soviet Union." To weaken the unions, Republicans would promote free trade and repeal the Davis Bacon Act that required prevailing wages on federally funded or assisted projects. The party would strive to restrict the use of compulsory union dues for political purposes. It would push for liability limitations on lawsuits to stanch the flow of funds to liberal groups and political candidates from trial lawyers. The GOP would weaken the National Education Association and teachers' unions by promoting "school choice." It would work to abolish the Legal Services Corporation and the Public Broadcasting System and kill incentives for tax-deductible donations to "liberal foundations" by repealing estate taxes.
In Wisconsin, the Republicans are continuing the anti-union component of the memo's strategy. With union membership in the private workforce diminished to about 7 percent, public sector unions have become vital sources of funds, votes, and volunteers for Democrats. About 36 percent of public employees are currently union members, including most teachers.
In the name of austerity, Governor Walker and his allies have selectively sought to strip the states' liberal teachers' unions of collective bargaining rights. They have proposed no such death sentence for more conservative police and firefighters' unions. In 2010, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, teachers' unions in Wisconsin contributed $389,000 to state-level campaigns, nearly all of it to Democrats.
The strategy to undermine teachers' unions also has spread beyond Michigan to other Republican-controlled states such as Indiana and Ohio. However, a recent
USA Today/Gallup Poll showing that 61% would oppose a law in their state similar to the proposal in Wisconsin, whereas only 33% would favor such a law may deter other Republicans from following Walker's lead.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans are likewise weakening what they view as left-leaning institutions. The proposed House budget ends funding for public broadcasting, which Republicans say provides a forum for liberal views. The budget eliminates funding to Planned Parenthood, a mainstay of the liberal pro-choice movement. Federal law already prohibits funding for abortion. The proposed cuts will instead eradicate contraceptive services, cancer and HIV screening, and health counseling. The budget slashes funding by 17 percent for the Legal Services Corporation, which represents poor people and it eliminates funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, considered a source of leftwing views on global warming.
As in Wisconsin, these Republican initiatives in Washington have little to do with deficit reduction. Even if the Senate and President Obama accepted all $61 billion in proposed Republican cutbacks, the $1.6 billion deficit would shrink by less than 4 percent. As the President's Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform made clear, real deficit reduction means seriously addressing entitlement programs, the defense budget, all farm payments, and the federal tax code.
In attempting to weaken the foundations of American liberalism, Republicans may have reached too far. Since their successful demonstrations in the battle for Florida after the 2000 election, conservatives have dominated the streets. Now, for the first time in recent memory, liberal protesters have taken to the streets in large numbers, portending perhaps the rise of the grassroots leftwing base that Obama promised, but failed to deliver thus far.
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California Healthcare Workers, the Law and the Future of American Labor
By CAL WINSLOW
The siege of the capitol in Wisconsin has moved trade unionism center stage – quite rightly and none too soon, as the right now has placed public workers in its crosshairs. More, this bottom-up (so far) rebellion, led by groups like the Madison teachers’ union, students and an array of rank-and-file workers, has once again high-lighted the imagination, the capacity to organize and potential power ordinary workers – in sharp contrast to the passive, dues collecting machines that constitute what’s left of US trade unionism.
Not that this is news. It is now nearly three years since 100 prominent university teachers, labor educators and activists appealed to then SEIU President Andy Stern to abandon plans to place the 150,000 member California healthcare local union, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) in trusteeship.
Trusteeship, the writers cautioned, “would have negative consequences for the workers directly affected, the SEIU itself, and for the labor movement as a whole. We strongly urge you to avoid such a tragedy.”
A tragedy, indeed, it has been. On January 29, 2009, SEIU, ignoring advice from all directions, refusing compromise on any issue, placed UHW, a militant, progressive, worker-led union in trusteeship – seized its offices, fired its elected officers – top to bottom – and set about dismantling the human infrastructure of the union, itself the product of years of struggle. Today, UHW remains, though as a shell of its former self – a UHW wrecked, not by the employers, nor the state, but by the SEIU international.
SEIU, now under new management, has used this California adventure to solidify its top down structures and refine its business friendly, corporate style reincarnation of the worst forms of US business unionism, not good news in the midst of a “recovery” that promises “austerity”, slashing public sector jobs, increasing cuts in an already enfeebled social safety net. The results in the state of California, as elsewhere, reveal among other things the absence of organized opposition, above all working class opposition. Governor Jerry Brown has introduced the liberal Democrats version of “austerity” – which includes a dramatic reduction in the number of state workers. This has been welcomed by SEIU’s newcomers, who supported Brown – not quite, perhaps, as lavishly as the international supported Obama, but generously, all the same. Carpetbagger David Kieffer, now appointed executive director of SEIU in California told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We support the governor’s approach.” (January 11, 2011)
These sad results did not come about without a fight, however - two years ago this month UHW members, responding to the seizure of their union, demanded the right to a union of their choice. They led the biggest decertification drive in history – a majority of UHW members petitioned for representation by a new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), led by the healthcare workers who had built UHW. There has followed what we have called a “civil war” in California labor – an intense, non-stop conflict.
NUHW has won victories at the University of Southern California Hospital, as well as with Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California professional workers and the nurses at the huge LA Sunset facility. In November, 1500 northern California Kaiser mental health professionals and optical workers voted to leave SEIU and join NUHW. In December, workers at Santa Rosa’s Memorial Hospital finally turned a six-year’s long, hard-fought representational campaign and election victory into a fight for a good contract – negotiations now underway. In January, 67 unorganized workers voted to join 860 NUHW members at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital workers who left SEIU in May 2010. These victories have been overshadowed, however, by the narrow defeat of home care workers in Fresno and the September, 2010 defeat at Kaiser.
Still, NUHW, against all odds, has survived; it has grown to 8000 members, no small achievement for a new union in this era of continuing sharp trade union decline – all the more impressive in the face of SEIU’s scorched earth, take-no prisoners invasion and occupation of California’s healthcare unions. NUHW is currently in negotiations with employers in twenty California facilities – it routinely receives requests for representation in healthcare facilities from workers throughout California in an industry that remains overwhelmingly non-union.
We have examined here how SEIU has used its huge resources, its wealth, its small army of full-time staff, threats, lies and reprisals as well as its teams of well-healed lawyers to maintain this control in local affiliates that still represent perhaps a third of all SEIU members; this in turn guarantees SEIU the millions of dollars in dues income these organizations and their members generate. The cost – for SEIU - of the Kaiser election (SEIU refuses requests to itemize its expenditures) ranks as one of the highest (per voter) in US history – Randy Shaw, writing in BeyondChron (September 7, 2010), estimated that the total was between $20 to $40 million.
Much of this has been spent in court rooms, in the 2008 pseudo-legal trusteeship proceedings, in the 2010 civil suit against former UHW leaders, and in the SEIU’s ongoing successful manipulation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the institution that administers US labor law. This last connection – that is, the collusion of SEIU and the NLRB – has been an essential component in the success of the SEIU onslaught.
According to Latika Malkani, an Oakland attorney who frequently represents NUHW, when employees seek decertification, typically papers must be filed within 42 days and the NLRB’s stated goal is to bring the issue to an election within six weeks. Bureaucratic, let’s say, but fair enough. SEIU, however, has successfully delayed these elections in some case for as much as two years, as in the case of the recent election at Sutter’s Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland. In other hospitals, for example, Oakland Children’s and Sutter’s California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, workers who petitioned in February 2009 still wait. Kaiser workers elections were delayed for eighteen months.
How is this done? Steve Early, in his new book, The Civil Wars in US Labor, explains that the NLRB, even in the best of circumstances, inevitably involves delay and frustration. The emergence of NUHW and “this huge wave of organizing activity swamped the NLRB in California. The Board is incapable of expediting union representation votes even when the objecting party is just an employer.”
SEIU lawyers took advantage. Immediately – following the filing of petitions – they responded with “unfair labor practices” charges. These must be investigated before an election is scheduled. Moreover, SEIU filed not just one set of charges, but continuously adds to these, and this leads to the necessity of more investigation, more delay. At the same time, SEIU charged two dozen NUHW leaders and staff with an array of alleged offences, forcing them into an extended and expensive legal battle in federal court in San Francisco. SEIU’s attorneys originally asked for $25 million in damages, though later this was revised down to $1.5 million. In the end, the jury found no conspiracy, no theft, no violence, no sabotage and no “contracts left open.” They did, however, find the remaining defendants plus NUHW liable for the $1.5 million, allegedly for betrayal of fiduciary duties. The jury ordered that defendants pay back part of salaries and costs for January 2009. In this they apparently agreed that the former UHW officers and staff obstructed the transfer from UHW of 65,000 long-term care members to the scandal ridden southern California local 6434 – without consent. And they seemed to agree that these defendants spent some time in January – before trusteeship – preparing to launch the new union, NUHW, not the crime of the century. Hardly much reward for the more than $10 million spent by SEIU. SEIU, to this day, harasses these individual workers, all with histories of long-term commitments to workers and their unions. These people face a campaign to collect for alleged damages, carried on as viciously as that of any slumlord or banker.
But there was more to it than that. SEIU’s lawyers worked in tandem to see that legal strategies overlapped. The charges in the civil trial were submitted as “unfair labor practices” in the NLRB hearings, allowing SEIU’s lawyers, says Malkani, to continuously “feed” the Board “new information.” In all this, “the NLRB was completely complacent.” The value of delay for SEIU is self-evident. But just as important is the use to which this time was put. NUHW organizers were, by law, denied access to the workers while the investigations were in process, and in nearly every case the employers were quite happy to collaborate. SEIU had sole access to bargaining materials; again the employers were more than compliant. On and on it has gone. And then appeals, cases sent back to Washington, DC, where, interestingly, Craig Becker, a former Assistant General Counsel for SEIU has been appointed by Obama to the national Board.
In all this SEIU’s lawyers successfully controlled the timing of the entire process – and hence effectively were able to decide when and where elections would be held. When conditions appeared favorable, SEIU would withdraw charges – the board would set the elections within the six weeks framework. When unfavorable, the delays continued, as they do in hospitals and other healthcare facilities to this day.
In the case of Kaiser, with eager employers, SEIU renegotiated the contract just before the election. SEIU then extolled imaginary improvements and threatened that all would be lost if NUHW prevailed. In turn, Kaiser illegally withheld negotiated pay raises from NUHW members in southern California; SEIU of course took advantage. Belatedly the NLRB found against Kaiser but not before SEIU used this to see that the damage was done. “Justice delayed” also allowed SEIU to cement relations with the employers, if indeed this was necessary. It has been revealed that SEIU international representatives approached California employers well before trusteeship, advising them not to recognize UHW elected leaders.
NUHW is now appealing the Kaiser election, charging that SEIU unlawfully threatened Kaiser employees with loss of benefits and wages; Kaiser paid SEIU representatives to campaign for SEIU; Kaiser provided special access to SEIU staff, while denying it to NUHW, and SEIU engaged in acts of physical force and violence against NUHW supporters. Nevertheless, while the NLRB investigates, the violations continue.
The case of the SEIU versus its members, demands attention. In this case, the issue is not simply do workers have the right to join a union; it is do workers have a right to join a union of their choice? The answer, certainly for SEIU, and apparently, listening to the silence of organized labor, seems to be “no”. Rather workers appear to be more like the property of unions. In the case of the California healthcare workers, thousands have essentially been held hostage; they have no free choice of union; they can be contained in archaic jurisdictional restrictions, by back-room wheeling and dealing and the accidents of history.
Still, workers have no choice but to participate, and NUHW has little choice but to appeal to the NLRB, no matter how slim the odds. They have a moral obligation to do whatever they can to rescue these captive healthcare workers. But it must be remembered that they belong to a different tradition – the origins of NUHW are in the thirties when in the aftermath of the General Strike San Francisco workers organized the nations’ first hospital union. The history of California healthcare workers is one of struggle – it is in part this history, it seems to me, that alerted the former UHW members and leaders to SEIU’s corporate strategies and inspired them to resist.
This ongoing conflict in California has its immediate origins in two related disputes – disputes worth remembering today. The first was the refusal of the UHW members and leaders to continue participation in the SEIU’s “Nursing Home Alliance” - a strategy that based organizing on partnerships with employers and “neutrality” agreements. These agreements typically allowed employers to pick and choose which facilities would be organized, they restrict workers’ rights, they enshrined long- term agreements (e.g. ten years in a Washington state contract), etc., all in return for employer “neutrality” in an election. No wonder workers frequently complained, “The boss brought me this union.”
The response to California’s refusal was first retaliation, then trusteeship. In retaliation, the international leaders announced their intention to remove 65,000 healthcare workers from UHW, transferring them, whether they liked it or not, to a scandal-ridden southern California local. Of course SEIU justified the transfer as in the best interests of the workers, whether they knew it or not.
We can now assess these conflicts. The “alliance” strategy, never fully implemented in California, has been put to the test in Ohio – interestingly the base of Ivy League Dave Regan, soon to be President of UHW, now appointed Trustee.
On January 31, workers in 39 of 44 units at hospitals and nursing homes in Ohio rejected representation by SEIU. These included some 7000 nurses, professional and nonprofessional staff, skilled maintenance workers, technical workers including licensed practical nurses, and employees of business offices at seven hospitals and eight nursing homes owned by Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP). The elections at the facilities were the culmination of an organizing campaign that had begun several years ago but were interrupted by alleged interference by the California Nurses Association (CNA). The CNA charged at the time that the hospital system and SEIU had reached an illegal “back room” deal that compromised workers' rights.
The latest election was held under an agreement between SEIU and CHP not to campaign or otherwise seek to influence workers' decisions on whether to be represented. According to NLRB, the only materials workers received were jointly created by the union and the employer to explain the voting process.
“It's not surprising that SEIU so overwhelmingly lost these elections,” said John Borsos, vice president of NUHW. “The fact that the election was triggered through a manipulation of the NLRB where the employer files for an election and the union never even establishes the required 30 per cent showing of interest to petition the election ensured that no real union was ever organized.”
A final note: when Ray Marshall, a then 80 year old former Secretary of Labor, the chief officer in the Trusteeship hearings in 2008-2009, announced his findings, they included recommending against trusteeship. However, incomprehensibly, he then advised that should UHW refuse the transfer of the 65,000, trusteeship would be justified. UHW agreed to the transfer, but only following a vote of the members. Trusteeship was imposed. Today, the 65,000 long-term care workers remain in UHW – apparently they were not the issue after all.
The civil war in California then continues; legal defense costs are now in the hundreds for thousands of dollars. SEIU’s clear intention continues to be to humiliate and break these people.
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