[Marxism] SEIU Disrupts 2008 Labor Notes

[Andy]

> can people point to some articles

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/us/12union.html

March 12, 2008
Rival Unions Battle in Ohio Over Workers at Hospitals
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The Service Employees International Union was brimming with confidence  
about unionizing 8,300 workers at nine Ohio hospitals through  
elections that were scheduled for this Wednesday and Friday. But then  
organizers from a rival union, the California Nurses Association,  
swept into town, buttonholing workers and maneuvering their way into  
hospital wards, to press the workers to vote not to join the S.E.I.U.

Thrown off balance, the service employees union on Tuesday suddenly  
asked to postpone the vote by workers at the nine hospitals, all part  
of the Catholic Healthcare Partners system.

Andy Stern, the service employees’ president, said the nurses  
association’s efforts were “nothing more than a flimsy cover for out- 
and-out union busting that we normally see from employers, not  
organizations that claim to care about workers.”

The California Nurses Association, an unusually militant union that is  
seeking to expand nationwide, said it dispatched organizers to Ohio  
because in its view the unionization efforts were part of a sweetheart  
deal.

Having seen many employers mount fierce campaigns against  
unionization, the service employees had reached an unusual deal with  
Catholic Healthcare Partners, to increase its chances of winning a  
unionization election. Catholic Healthcare and the union promised to  
campaign civilly and not mount angry all-out efforts against each other.

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses association,  
condemned this agreement. She called it “a rigged scam” in which the  
service employees union would bargain only half-heartedly if it won  
the vote.

“This was a top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked  
union,” Ms. DeMoro said. “There was a gag order on everyone, and as a  
result this was a banana republic election.”

She said the decision to delay the election was “a significant victory  
for employee rights.”

No new election date was set.

Service employee officials said the agreement sought to maximize the  
union’s chances of winning a fair election in an era when unions are  
struggling to reverse decades of decline.

Dave Regan, president of a service employees’ local representing  
35,000 health care workers in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, called  
the nurses union’s efforts immoral and despicable.

“Their conduct is indistinguishable from that of the most vicious anti- 
union employers,” Mr. Regan said. “It violates every principle of  
unionism. Real people are worse off today as a result of their  
behavior.”

He ridiculed the notion that the service employees were a hand-picked  
union. He said it took three years of negotiations, letter writing and  
protests by hundreds of workers to press Catholic Healthcare into  
agreeing to the election agreement. Those efforts came after the  
A.F.L.-C.I.O., the service employees and other unions urged several  
Roman Catholic bishops to press many Catholic hospitals to stop being  
so hostile toward unionization.

Responding to Ms. DeMoro’s assertion that the union had entered a  
sweetheart deal in which it would bargain halfheartedly, Mr. Regan  
noted that after unionizing 550 nurses at a Catholic Healthcare  
hospital in Lorain, Ohio, the service employees staged two contentious  
strikes in an effort to obtain a contract.

Orest Holubec, spokesman for Catholic Healthcare, said the system’s  
hospital in Lima had obtained a restraining order to bar the  
California nurses from entering restricted patient-care areas and  
aggressive leafletting outside hospitals.

“They were doing exactly the kind of things we were trying to avoid,”  
Mr. Holubec said. “They poisoned the well to the degree that we didn’t  
have the conditions that we tried to establish for a pressure-free  
environment.”

The service employees union and the California Nurses Association both  
represent tens of thousands of nurses and have fought for years, with  
the nurses association arguing in Ohio and elsewhere that skilled  
workers like nurses should belong to nurses’ unions and not to unions  
of diverse workers like the service employees.