Nurses will never forget SEIU’s Attack on the Labor Notes Conference

SEIU International has become the union of choice for growing numbers of corporate CEOs. What SEIU has to offer is a business partnership, in five key areas “with a union that could add value to their bottom line,” as SEIU President Andy Stern wrote in his book “A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track.”

The frequent cost — sacrificing public protections, workplace improvements, and a voice for workers on the job and in their union. “Employers live in a competitive environment and have to meet certain shareholder expectations, and labor can play a role in helping to meet them.”
— Andy Stern, McKinsey Quarterly interview, 2006

1. Cutting labor costs for employers

SEIU promises cost containment through long term contracts that limit economic or benefit gains, favor market-based 401(k) pension plans over more expensive defined benefit guaranteed pensions, and accommodate layoffs, outsourcing and globalization.  Under a 2003 SEIU pact with California nursing homes, management was handed the “exclusive right” to set pay rates; lay off, demote, discipline, and determine benefits without union input; outsource union members’ work; and speed up, reassign, or eliminate jobs at will.

“We are surely the only hospital association and health-care workers union in the history of the United States to support a process that could lead to the downsizing of our own industry.”
— Joint statement, SEIU, Greater New York Hospital Association, Syracuse, NY, Post-Standard, December 7, 2006

“Based on your request, we agreed to forego those demands...to provide a defined benefit pension plan or retiree health plan in our California bargaining.”
— Dennis Rivera, SEIU Healthcare chair, letter to Tenet Healthcare, June 18, 2007

2. Guaranteeing labor peace

SEIU promises to end conflict in the workplace with pacts or offers that prohibit strikes or picketing for up to 10 years, substitute union staffers for rank and file bargaining teams in contract negotiations, deny the right of healthcare workers to speak out about safe patient care, and eliminate grievances. A recent SEIU innovation is replacing workplace labor representation with “member service centers” — call centers, warehoused far from the workplace, where workers must call to get help from their union.

“We also agreed to a [inquiry process] giving up our right to strike for both the current successor agreement and any future reopener.”
— Dennis Rivera, SEIU Healthcare chair, letter to Tenet Healthcare, June 18, 2007

“We want to find a 21st century model that is less focused on individual grievances, more focused on industry needs.”
— Andy Stern, Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2007

3. Protecting employers from regulation

SEIU partnerships include pledges to lobby on behalf of employers against laws or regulations to strengthen public protections and oversight. For its California nursing home pact, SEIU agreed to back legislation impeding patients’ right to sue over nursing home abuses and neglect, and to oppose reforms to require better staffing to assure patient safety. The union was barred from reporting healthcare code violations. Under a similar pact with Washington state nursing homes, SEIU agreed to not try to put pressure on management “through voluntary adverse reporting to any regulatory or other oversight agency.” In Massachusetts and California, SEIU has joined the hospital industry to lobby against minimum registered nurse-to-patient staffing ratio laws, and in other states, has proposed unenforceable, “voluntary” staffing legislation.

“Unions must be experts in ... assisting employers in overcoming unnecessary legislative and political obstacles.”
— Andy Stern, “A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track”

4. Heading off real healthcare reform, and ending employer health costs

SEIU International is also working to reduce or eliminate healthcare costs for all employers. Their goals: (1) blunt the grassroots movement for genuine, single payer healthcare reform, (2) eliminate employer responsibility to provide health care coverage for workers, and (3) re-direct national and state legislative proposals toward insurance-based reforms that shift the burden from business to individuals. To those ends, Stern has joined with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, the insurance industry, and other major corporate interests including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Realtors, Manpower Inc., and Business Roundtable. These coalitions provide political cover for the insurance industry, creating the impression that it supports reform, and for Wal-Mart to deflect criticism for its failure to provide decent health coverage for its employees.

“It is time to admit that the employer-based health care system is dead, a relic of the industrial economy.”
— Andy Stern, Huffington Post, February 7, 2007

“I don’t think the country is going to go to a single payer system right now... I don’t think it’s willing, I don’t think it’s able.”
— Andy Stern, America’s Health Insurance Plans forum, March 5, 2008

5. Saving CEOs from progressive unions

SEIU International offers itself as a cooperative alternative to unions that aggressively challenge employers. In healthcare, SEIU regularly presents itself as the employer-friendly alternative to the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, which refuses to sign agreements that will require RNs to act in the interests of employers, rather than patients, or erode workplace standards. In Puerto Rico, SEIU International aligned with the governor to replace the militant 40,000-member Puerto Rico Federation of Teachers (FMPR). As the FMPR fought poor conditions for teachers, class sizes, and a draconian no-strike law, the governor, since indicted on charges of corruption, decertified the union and held meetings with SEIU’s Dennis Rivera who put together a new union to raid and replace the FMPR.

“The governor told Dennis, ‘It’s essentially yours to take,’ said one source who claims he was at a meeting in late December between top island union leaders, the governor and Rivera.”
— New York Daily News, February 29, 2008

"Americans don’t relate to class conflict. Class was an importation from other countries. It is not an indigenous American ideal.”
— Andy Stern, In These Times, January 5, 2007

SEIU’s Philosophy in Action

When the boss picks your union

Under a backroom deal with Catholic Healthcare Partners in February, 2008, the employer, not the workers or union, filed for elections to impose SEIU as the union in eight Ohio hospitals without providing a single signed union card. SEIU agreed to not try to influence the election. Employees were specifically forbidden from talking about the union or the election. This model eliminates the role of workers in organizing a union, or building the power of the union in the workplace through collective action.

“At some of the hospitals no organizing committee existed, and no contact with workers had taken place for years, according to Colleen Gresham, an Ohio nurse and top supporter of SEIU. ‘We were actually surprised by the secret vote. We didn’t know it was coming’.”
— Labor Notes, April 2008

The Ohio Hospital Association praised the agreement as refreshing.
— Springfield, Ohio News-Sun, March 13, 2008

Making public health collateral damage

In 2003 SEIU 1199 demanded that Cuyahoga County assist its efforts to gain new members at Cleveland area social service agencies and a major medical center. SEIU offered $500,000 to support a critical health and human services levy for public health services — and threatened to spend heavily against it if the county refused. When the county rejected the blackmail, SEIU launched a heavy-handed, unsuccessful opposition campaign, with claims, such as telling voters their property taxes would go up 60 percent, that led the Ohio Elections Commission to censure SEIU.

“The SEIU is purposefully trying to rip an $80 million hole in Cuyahoga County’s safety net by denying basic human services for needy children, the working poor and those in desperate need of mental health treatment” and “cares not a whit for the lives it will crush in the process.”
— Editorial, “Bald Face Lies,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 25, 2003

Silencing the voice of workers and dissent

Through compacts with employers, SEIU International has limited the role of union members in bargaining, contract ratifications, strikes or picketing, and direct access to union representatives. Members on a bargaining team in Las Vegas were required to sign loyalty oaths to SEIU. Internally, SEIU has merged locals into giant mega-locals to diminish local voices and representation, appointed non-elected officials to run the new locals, and trusteed locals that offered resistance.

“The union is now a corporate-style organization where members and their issues are ignored. Members are furious.”
— Joel Solis, registered nurse, steward, SEIU Local 721, Los Angeles County, Labor Notes, April 2008

“We agree with President Stern that we need to organize the unorganized. But the way the International is organizing new workers, it is weakening our union. Their top-down deals with employers, the exclusion of members, the erosion of democracy and free speech undermine our power.”
— Zev Kvitky, president, SEIU Local 2007, Stanford University, Labor Notes, April 2008

“The question that arises in our union and many others is whether or not the ideal of democracy and practical reality have a matchup.”
— Andy Stern, Chicago Tribune, April 7, 1997

“You can have a democratic baseball team and be in last place... I just don’t believe—and this is where I get myself in a lot of trouble — that simply having the most democratic, militant shop floor unionism that loses is necessarily what workers are looking for.”
— Andy Stern, speech, The Harvard Club, March 14, 2005

The CNA/NNOC Alternative — Social Unionism

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO has a very different perspective than the current SEIU International leadership. The labor movement’s greatest growth occurs when (1) its interests are identified as identical to the public interests, (2) elevating standards for its members improves conditions for all Americans, and (3) it is seen as a fighter for workplace democracy and rights, not for “adding value” to employers. Those are CNA/NNOC’s goals.

Patient and Consumer Advocacy

• Sponsored the nation’s most important hospital patient safety law, California's RN-to-patient staffing ratios, the model for similar laws across the U.S.
• Co-sponsored numerous laws to crack down on insurance industry abuses.
• Led protests on behalf of numerous patients denied needed medical care.

Single-Payer Healthcare Reform

A national leader in the fight for single-payer, Medicare-for-All style healthcare reform. A foremost critic of healthcare proposals that expand insurance company control of our health and perpetuate the current crisis.

Challenging Corporate Healthcare

• Opposition to labor-management partnerships that endanger public health and patient care conditions.
• Agreements that protect the right of RNs to act on behalf of the patient’s interest — not their employer’s bottom line.

Workplace and Member Activism

• Direct election of CNA/NNOC officers and board members.
• Strong workplace committees of nurse leaders elected by their co-workers to bargain contracts and work on improved workplace and patient care conditions.
• Hundreds of educational workshops involving thousands of members.
• Organizing campaigns initiated by nurses, not the employer.

A Record of Success

• Best RN contracts in the nation with unmatched provisions in pay, pensions, retiree health benefits, and an independent voice in patient care protections.
• Nation’s largest organization of direct-care RNs, and the fastest growing healthcare union — more than 375 percent growth the past decade, with 80,000 members in all 50 states.