Union Battle in
California Threatens S.E.I.U.
Published: September 13, 2010 - New York Times
OAKLAND, Calif. — During his two decades building one of the largest union
locals in California, Sal Rosselli earned a reputation as a cunning strategist
and street fighter — someone who often vilified hospital chains during contract
battles.
These days, he is using those brass knuckles on his former colleagues at the
Service
Employees International Union in a battle that threatens to rip a giant hole
in the most powerful union in the nation’s largest state.
The S.E.I.U.’s national leadership ousted Mr. Rosselli last year after a
power struggle that ended with a jury finding that he had improperly used member
dues to form a breakaway union. Shortly after being ousted, Mr. Rosselli did
create a rival union, and now he is trying to lure many of his former members —
43,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente, the largest health care provider in the
state.
On Monday, workers at 331 Kaiser facilities across California began voting by
mail on whether to bolt the S.E.I.U. and join Mr. Rosselli’s group, the National
Union of Healthcare Workers.
A victory would give a vital boost to Mr. Rosselli’s fledgling 6,000-member
union, all but assuring its long-term survival. It would also be a huge blow to
the 1.9-million-member service employees union, since Mr. Rosselli’s group would
gain the stature and dues money to finance a broader war for far more S.E.I.U.
members.
Many in the labor movement hail Mr. Rosselli as a fearless champion of
bottom-up union democracy who is challenging what he calls the S.E.I.U.’s
“sweetheart deals” with employers. But others denounce him as an ego-driven pied
piper waging a wasteful civil war within the country’s fastest-growing, most
politically active union.
The Kaiser face-off is the biggest union election in the private sector since
1941, when 74,000 workers at Ford
Motor’s River Rouge complex in Michigan, then the world’s largest industrial
facility, voted to unionize. The Ford vote was a giant step in building the
labor movement; some see the Kaiser fight as a major step backward.
“It’s tragic that with so many workers wanting to be organized into unions,
so much energy and money are being devoted to the fight at Kaiser,” said William
B. Gould IV, a labor law professor at Stanford
University and former chairman of the National
Labor Relations Board.
With unusual nastiness, the two unions have traded accusations of lying,
stealing, fraud and intimidation — not exactly the image the labor movement
wants to project as it tries to improve its tattered reputation. In one
instance, Mr. Rosselli’s group accused S.E.I.U. activists of threatening some
immigrant Kaiser employees with deportation unless they stopped supporting the
rival union. Service employee officials say that is a lie concocted by Rosselli
partisans with feverish imaginations.
The fratricidal war is a distraction as the November elections approach. The
S.E.I.U. has dispatched hundreds of foot soldiers to defeat Mr. Rosselli. Other
unions say they wish those activists were campaigning instead to elect
union-friendly lawmakers.
Meanwhile, corporate executives can only gloat as they watch the S.E.I.U. — a
scourge to many employers because of its aggressive tactics — spend millions of
dollars battling not business, but another union. Saying “the S.E.I.U. is
putting unimagined resources into this fight,” Mr. Rosselli asserts that his
nemesis will spend $40 million on the election; S.E.I.U. officials say they will
spend at most one-tenth that amount.
Such intra-labor wars are fairly rare, partly because they are costly and
often paralyze unionization efforts. But the service employees have been in
several such fights recently, including a 2008 struggle with the California
Nurses Association that resulted in the nurses blocking an S.E.I.U. effort to
unionize 8,300 workers in Ohio.
The Kaiser battle resembles a political campaign. Mr. Rosselli and S.E.I.U.
leaders are visiting dozens of Kaiser facilities, with their foot soldiers
distributing leaflets at nursing home entrances at daybreak and buttonholing
co-workers at lunchtime.
Mr. Rosselli’s fliers denounce the “scandal-plagued S.E.I.U.” and accuse it
of “physically threatening behavior” — including allegedly kicking down the
screen door of a Rosselli supporter and pasting up S.E.I.U. fliers at her home.
(Service employee officials say that was done by Rosselli activists masquerading
as S.E.I.U. campaigners.)
The S.E.I.U. has built its campaign around one main argument: that the Kaiser
workers could lose 9 percent in anticipated raises if they switch unions. The
Rosselli forces say that is a lie. Outside labor specialists say that if the
workers vote to leave the S.E.I.U., Kaiser can assert that the contract is void
because that union no longer represents its employees. Under federal law,
however, the contract’s terms would remain in force until Kaiser and Mr.
Rosselli’s union either negotiated a new contract or reached an impasse — at
which point Kaiser could impose new terms and perhaps scrap the previously
negotiated raises.
A Kaiser spokesman, John E. Nelson, declined to discuss the raises and said
Kaiser was staying neutral in the election. “We will bargain in good faith with
whatever union our employees choose,” he said.
The S.E.I.U. repeatedly points out that a federal jury ordered Mr. Rosselli
and his leadership team last April to repay $1.57 million that they had
illegally diverted from member dues to finance their breakaway.
Mr. Rosselli dismisses all the accusations, even the jury’s findings, as “big
lies.”
Mr. Rosselli said that during his 21 years heading the local, United
Healthcare Workers-West, “we made great improvements in pensions and job
security and obtained the highest wages.”
Mary
Kay Henry, who became the S.E.I.U.’s president in May, said the fight with
Mr. Rosselli’s union was “a waste of time, energy and resources.” But she is not
backing away. “I would ask N.U.H.W. to consider organizing nonunion workers if
they want to revitalize the labor movement and address the crisis for working
people,” she said.
For years, Mr. Rosselli had allied himself with Ms. Henry’s predecessor, Andy
Stern. But the relationship broke down in 2008 when Mr. Rosselli grew
convinced that Mr. Stern was marginalizing him.
Mr. Rosselli began complaining that Mr. Stern was an undemocratic, top-down
leader who was not giving his Oakland-based local enough say in negotiating
national contracts. He complained that Mr. Stern had bargained clandestine deals
that traded away gains for current workers in exchange for making it easier to
organize employers’ nonunion facilities.
Mr. Stern removed Mr. Rosselli in January 2009 for misusing dues money and
refusing to accept the parent union’s decision to transfer 65,000 members to
another local.
Now, Mr. Rosselli seems intent on getting back all his former members — and
then some. His union has already won a dozen smaller elections against the
S.E.I.U., although it has lost several contests, too.
Mr. Rosselli contends that if his union wins at Kaiser, that will be the
beginning of the end of the S.E.I.U. as a national health care union. His goal
is to take away S.E.I.U. members at the California operations of Tenet, Sutter
and other hospital chains, diminishing the S.E.I.U.’s clout with national
companies.
If Mr. Rosselli loses the election, his union could wither away. “They can’t
survive without Kaiser,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. “They will become a very marginal outfit.”
Dave Regan, who was named co-trustee to run the Oakland local after Mr.
Rosselli’s ouster, said he had negotiated large raises at Kaiser, protected
health benefits and involved rank-and-file workers in negotiations. He now leads
the campaign against Mr. Rosselli and his team and calls them “fundamentally
dishonest and unprincipled.”
“How could you encourage people to put their pay and benefits at risk?” Mr.
Regan said. “This is a situation where a group of disgraced previous leaders who
were rightfully removed from office have chosen to put the interests of 43,000
union members beneath their personal self-interest.”
Both unions confidently predict victory when balloting ends on Oct. 4.
Passing out leaflets recently outside Kaiser’s giant clinic building in San
Francisco, Kelela Moberg, a pharmacy technician and Rosselli supporter, said the
election was a valuable exercise in democracy. “Having a choice is always a good
thing,” she said. “If you have a monopoly that’s the only union for health care
workers, that’s not good.”
But Earlene Person, a vocational nurse in Oakland, said the contest was
destructive. “A lot of us have walked picket lines together, but now we have
members divided against each other,” she said.