[Marxism] Service Employees End California Nursing Home Partnership

[Greg McDonald]

I wrote recently that fellow workers at my workplace were in  
agreement that SEIU would not be a good union choice due to their  
crappy politics and top-down approach. The following article  
reinforces our analysis. So much for internal democracy and  
collective bargaining rights in the SEIU.

Greg


Service Employees End California Nursing Home Partnership

By ellis
Created Jun 25 2007 - 6:36am
Author(s):
Mark Brenner
Excerpt:
Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service  
Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial  
partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May  
31. The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrangement  
that brought over 3,000 workers into SEIU after the union secured  
higher state government payments to nursing homes that care for  
Medicaid patients. In addition to giving SEIU organizing access to a  
number of nursing homes, the agreement provided “template” contract  
language for these newly organized workplaces. . . .
Story Body:
Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service  
Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial  
partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May  
31. The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrangement  
that brought over 3,000 workers into SEIU after the union secured  
higher state government payments to nursing homes that care for  
Medicaid patients. In addition to giving SEIU organizing access to a  
number of nursing homes, the agreement provided “template” contract  
language for these newly organized workplaces.

SEIU announced it was ending the partnership just days after the  
executive board of United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), one of the  
two SEIU locals that were party to the original deal, launched a  
campaign to steer the agreement in a different direction.

In recent weeks, leaders of UHW, which represents health care workers  
throughout California, started a petition campaign to force SEIU’s  
international board to give members a voice in re-negotiating the  
nursing home partnership. As part of that campaign, UHW leaders sent  
a letter to members painting a grim picture of where things were headed:

“Some in the national SEIU are negotiating an agreement with nursing  
home employers—in California and nationally—and have repeatedly  
excluded UHW nursing home members and elected representatives from  
the process. These agreements could restrict our nursing home  
members’ voice on the job and be implemented without affected members  
even having the right to vote.”

UHW leaders proposed three principles that should govern any future  
employer agreement in the health care industry: union democracy, the  
right to aggressively advocate for the people they serve, and full  
union membership for workers organized through partnership agreements.

Using the petition campaign and intense behind-the-scenes pressure,  
UHW leaders demanded that these principles “be embodied by clearly  
defined contract standards” in all future agreements.

WHAT IS AT STAKE?

Each of the three principles responds to problems with the nursing  
home partnership identified by health care workers and patient  
advocates since its inception.

For example, the agreement prohibited the union from reporting  
problems with organized nursing homes to state regulators or the  
media, except in cases mandated by law. Short staffing was one such  
issue, and a top concern for new members organized under the  
agreement, according to internal UHW survey data. But under the terms  
of the partnership, the union was barred from waging an aggressive  
public campaign to address staff-to-patient ratios.

Similarly, most workers who joined SEIU through the partnership  
agreement ended up with “template” contracts that were negotiated  
before they joined the union. These deals, according to an internal  
analysis by UHW, “allowed for very little power on the shop floor  
with no right to strike and no clear path towards full collective  
bargaining rights.”

The overall effect was to create a growing pool of second-class union  
members, with the pre-negotiated deals “discouraging—and in some  
cases preventing—workers from independently engaging in struggle to  
improve their working conditions.”

Finally, the California nursing home agreement reflected a new  
approach to organizing members and negotiating contracts in the  
nursing home industry, one aimed at spreading these agreements  
nationwide. Under this new model the international union,  
particularly a small group of national officers and staff, played a  
decisive role in negotiating with nursing home operators. Current  
nursing home workers, and their elected union leaders, were kept at  
arm’s length during recent talks, leading to a justifiable concern  
about who was looking out for their interests in negotiations.

According to SEIU members in Northern California, interest in this  
partnership agreement has been high. More than 20,000 people had  
signed the UHW petition within weeks of its release.

“We’ve signed up over half the members where I work,” said one UHW  
shop steward who asked to remain anonymous. “What really got people  
upset was this idea that guys in suits, sitting in Washington, D.C.,  
will bargain our contracts.

“These are people who have never worked in a hospital and who don’t  
know anything about our jobs. Then, to top it off, we won’t even have  
a right to vote on the contract they negotiate.”

FAST-TRACK PARTNERSHIPS

Although the California nursing home agreement has been shelved, it  
sparked a national debate inside SEIU, raising important questions  
about what kind of labor-management partnerships are possible or  
advisable as the union continues its relentless drive to expand its  
membership.

Jerome Brown, former president of SEIU’s massive 1199 New England  
health care local, has openly questioned whether the union can forge  
effective employer partnerships from scratch in non-union workplaces.  
In a review of SEIU International President Andy Stern’s 2006 book, A  
Country that Works, Brown noted that real gains, including organizing  
rights, were usually “the payoff for years of struggles, strikes, and  
other conflicts with employers.”

Only after a period of open conflict, Brown argued, can “strong  
unions and engaged members enter into mature, cooperative  
relationships” with their employers. By contrast, the arrangements  
SEIU has used to organize the nursing home industry left Brown with  
some lingering concerns:

“We have to ask ourselves if these methods can produce a real,  
democratic workers’ organization or if it is more likely that they  
will produce a ‘membership’ that is as alienated from the union  
leadership as it is from the employer. A ‘membership’ that sees  
itself, correctly, as a third party in a relationship with union  
brokers and employers—the very antithesis of true rank-and-file  
unionism.”

This perspective, that it’s “the bosses bringing in the union” rather  
than the members, was common among nursing home workers organized  
under the California agreement, according to internal UHW documents.  
For UHW leaders, this raised the question of, “What kind of worker  
organizations are…template agreements creating?”

After years of experience, some of these leaders have concluded that  
these arrangements “may come close to becoming what have historically  
been called ‘company’ unions.”

Available Online:
Yes


Source URL:
http://labornotes.org/node/989