SEIU plans to form new union

Service Employees International Union announced plans Friday to unite 240,000 home care and nursing home workers in California in a single local union. Leaders at SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, a feisty health care local that represents 140,000 long-term care and hospital workers in the state — and would lose almost half of its membership if the new union local is formed — immediately fired off a petition asking for a membership vote on disaffiliation from the international union.

The escalation of a nasty internal rift at SEIU over organizing and negotiating tactics comes at a time of high-stakes contract negotiations and threats of budget cuts in Sacramento that could have a drastic effect on hours and wages for health care workers. With a big clock ticking on the $42 billion state budget deficit, efforts by SEIU to form a new local union and UHW to disconnect from the fold will play out over the next few months.

The international union has tapped executive vice president Eliseo Medina and Michael Holland, an attorney with experience in union reorganizations, to draw up an implementation plan and timeline for the new statewide local within 30 days. A disaffiliation vote could be scheduled as soon as the next 60 days.

The SEIU announcement came after a vote Friday by the executive board to adopt the recommendation of an outside hearing officer and an advisory vote of the union’s membership in California last year.

The jurisdictional changes, started in 2000 by the board and SEIU president Andy Stern, seek to break up political fiefdoms in favor of uniting workers by industry and geography.

Board action means that UHW’s 65,000 long-term care and home care workers will be united in a new local with 140,000 workers from SEIU Local 6434 and 15,500 workers from Local 521.

“We will have a united voice in Sacramento and (Washington) D.C.,” said executive vice president Mary Kay Henry. “Our No. 1 job in is to use the next 30 days to galvanize health care and nursing home workers” to support economic recovery plans in California and Washington, D.C., and to fight budget cuts on both coasts, she said.

The implementation plan will deal with current contract negotiations and make sure there is an orderly transfer process that ensures workers’ interests are protected, she said.

UHW’s letter to Stern reports “widespread and profound opposition within our membership to any efforts to dismember our local union or to take away its rights of democratic governance.”

UHW leaders declined further comment.

Sacramento Business Journal

Debate on Democracy in SEIU-UHW [2/08]
Part 1
Part 2
Funny Andy Stern

Andy Stern Responds [0/08]

Intro to SEIU from Andy Stern

Anna Burger talks

And Who Decides the Fate of UHW?

“SEIU has evolved into a dictatorship in which Andy Stern and others have consolidated power, decision-making authority, and resources among a few.”–Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers-West, in The San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 3, 2008

On Thursday, January 8, a group of 70 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials will join a conference call, set up in Washington, D.C., to decide the fate of 150,000 members of United Healthcare Workers-West, SEIU’s third-largest affiliate. Among the actions the SEIU International Executive Board (IEB) may take is transferring 65,000 long-term care workers in California, against their will, from UHW into a new statewide entity with officers appointed by SEIU President Andy Stern.

Either on this call or during a meeting Jan. 20., Stern’s board may also approve a headquarters take-over of UHW’s remaining 85,000 members. This would be accomplished via a Stern-imposed trusteeship that would replace all UHW elected leaders and further obliterate their local, one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic in SEIU.

SEIU spokesmen are downplaying the impact of either course of action.

They say it’s just an “internal matter,” a question of changing “local union jurisdiction,” after a long deliberative process, resulting in “democratic” decisions. Stern points to a recent “advisory vote” with an 86.2 percent showing in favor of his California re-organization plan. What he neglects to mention is that only 24,000 members cast valid ballots, out of 309,000 who received them-a 7 percent participation rate. More than 120,000 workers-in UHW and two other locals-actively boycotted the election, signing cards or petitions protesting it. Members pointed out that SEIU’s ballot only gave them two options, both leading to UHW dismemberment. As rank-and-filer Lola Young explained to The Sacramento Bee, “It was like asking me if I wanted to be shot in the left knee or the right knee. It’s not much of a choice.”

As widely reported in the California press, tens of thousands of hospital, nursing home, and home care workers like Young spent much of last year mobilizing to keep UHW intact and their own popular president, Sal Rosselli, in office. They made it clear, on numerous occasions, that they favored Rosselli’s approach to health care organizing and bargaining over Stern’s. In late 2008, they picked up support from prominent friends of labor and revered union figures like United Farm Workers founding mother, Dolores Huerta. In two recent public letters, nearly 300 elected officials, community activists, clergy members, academics, and trade unionists noted that Rosselli’s local had “consistently acted with the highest integrity, placing the best interests of caregivers, consumers, and communities at the center of its work.” The concerned politicians–including leading California liberals like Sheila Kuehl, Mervin Dymally, Fiona Ma, Tom Ammiano, and Dean Florez–urged Stern to “seek a peaceful resolution of your dispute with UHW rather than precipitate a crippling civil war inside SEIU.”

Despite such appeals, SEIU headquarters is still poised to launch the union equivalent of George Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Stern’s own misbegotten invasion of California could cost millions of dues dollars (on top of the huge amounts SEIU has already spent trying to undermine UHW). It will require the deployment of many international union staffers (who numbered more than 600 at last count and presumably have better things to do elsewhere.) None of these would-be occupiers of UHW will be greeted as “liberators” by the rank-and-file, as they attempt to displace elected UHW board members, bargaining committees, stewards, and mobilizers. UHW employers will have a field day with the resulting disruption of contract negotiations and enforcement.

At a time when unions are urging Congress to pass an Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), to aid union organizing and bargaining, there will be much damaging publicity for all of labor. It will highlight the fact that most SEIU members in California no longer have the right to choose what local they’re in or who represents them. Already anti-EFCA groups have run full-page ads in major newspapers playing up SEIU’s role in foisting Gov. Rod Blagojevich on the now unappreciative citizens of Illinois. When and if Stern pulls the trigger on UHW, UnionFacts.com and similar management front groups will have a propaganda field day displaying the corpse of workers’ rights within SEIU.

For some outside observers, one of the mysteries of this affair is why SEIU board members have, so far, gone along with what N.Y. Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez calls a “colossal scam” and “a stunning assault on union democracy.” SEIU’s IEB is, after all, the union’s top decision-making body (except when its convention is in session once every four years). In their own communities, some IEB members are well-known progressives. Among those with a resume that includes Sixties’ activism, a few were once even communists, socialists, and/or union dissidents themselves. Today, they’re understandably proud to be part of a board, which is, by far, the most diverse in labor, in many important categories. Among SEIU’s president, secretary-treasurer, six executive vice-presidents, 23 vice-presidents, five Canadian or retiree representatives, and 37 others simply titled “IEB Member,” one finds more women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and gays than in any other similar executive body.

Unfortunately, how this “diversity” was achieved creates a major problem in terms of IEB accountability to the membership vs. the top leadership. The SEIU board has been structured and its members recruited in such a way that it doesn’t provide a check on the power of the president or secretary-treasurer, Andy Stern and Anna Burger respectively, or any meaningful oversight of their activities. Some officials on the board do have a base in their own local unions (usually, smaller ones) that they developed themselves as locally elected leaders and four out of 73 are elected just by their fellow Canadians, as a concession to Canadian “autonomy.” But the vast majority owes their union jobs and careers, now and in the past, to the two top officers. In very corporate fashion, Stern and Burger have transformed their board into a “management team,” that has about the same degree of real “independence” as corporate directors hand-picked by a powerful CEO. If any member ever steps out of line-like Rosselli did in recent years, due to policy differences with Stern-he or she will be dropped from the team, as Rosselli was last June when the current Stern-Burger “administration slate” was elected by 2,000 delegates meeting in Puerto Rico. At SEIU conventions–since the entire board (except for Canadians) is elected “at large”–an independent candidate has about as much chance of winning as a dissident shareholder running for director of General Electric at its annual meeting.

In other labor organizations-even ones more deserving of the moniker “business union”-national executive boards are filled with former workers who came up through the ranks. Ambitious rank-and-filers have a much better chance of making it to the top elsewhere than in SEIU. Candidates for board positions usually start out as a shop steward. Later, they become an elected local union leader, perhaps serve on the national staff for awhile, and then run for a seat on the national executive, as an independent or on someone else’s slate. In big unions like the Teamsters and Steelworkers, some candidates run for at-large positions-ie union-wide office, like the presidency-but most board hopefuls have to compete for fellow members’ votes in regional conferences or districts where they live, work, and are known.

In unions like my own former employer, the Communications Workers of America, the top officers and executive board are elected, as in SEIU, by convention delegates chosen by the members, not via the more democratic Teamster or Steelworker method of direct elections. But, regardless of whether voting is direct or indirect and no matter how bureaucratized a union may have become, the allocation of executive board seats to different constituencies (smaller than the entire union) tends to make some board members more politically accountable to those at the bottom rather than just the top. In the Communications Workers of America, for example, most board members represent either multi-state districts (ranging in size from 20,000 to 175,000 members). Or they are elected from occupational groups such as manufacturing workers, flight attendants, public employees, or journalists. Competition for seats on the CWA board is quite common. Independent candidates can even oust incumbents backed by the national president and fellow board members, as a challenger did last spring in the CWA/Newspaper Guild. Even the current president, Larry Cohen, was first elected to CWA office ten years ago only after facing stiff competition from an incumbent board member vying for the same open position as EVP.
What’s striking about SEIU is not only the absence of similar opportunities for competitive elections, but also the union background and current payroll status of many board members. According to an analysis done by UHW prior to the election and expansion of the IEB last year, “the majority are Stern appointees or staff. Out of [what was then] 67 members of the IEB, well over half are either SEIU International Union staff, or local leaders who were originally appointed to leadership positions in their local by Stern, rather than being elected by their members.” Opportunities for such career-advancing appointments abound in SEIU, to a degree unique in the labor movement. That’s because, under Stern, nearly 80 local unions have been put under headquarters trusteeships and/or re-organized with new leaders named by him, rather than elected by the members. (Due to its consolidation into huge, regional bodies, SEIU now has only 300 “locals” left.)

Union trusteeships are supposed to be a method of rooting out corruption, straightening out a troubled local’s finances or functioning, and then holding elections within eighteen months that return the local to membership control.

In SEIU, however, Stern-installed trustees or “interim presidents” are usually staffers from outside the local who are given as long as three years to entrench themselves politically, before facing any membership vote.

Running as de facto incumbents, they usually win, with the help of a large number of other paid staffers who are, by then, working for them on the union payroll as well. To get the picture, one need look no further than the six officials who serve directly under Stern and Burger-Annelle Grajeda, May Kay Henry, Gerry Hudson, Eliseo Medina, Dave Regan, and Tom Woodruff. Now earning nearly $200,000 each, four of these six executive vice-presidents have never been working members, in any SEIU jurisdiction; the other two became part of SEIU through its merger with District 1199, the New York-based health care union. The four originally hired from outside served as either trustee of a local, a local union executive director, or in some other appointed staff position. All owe their original or later, higher-ranking jobs to the sponsorship of Stern, Burger, or a fellow EVP.

Within the larger SEIU board-as talented as some members may be–this patronage system has been producing some rotten fruit lately (or, as SEIU loyalists describe it, “a few bad apples”). Just two months after her elevation to EVP on Stern and Burger’s ticket, Grajeda came under investigation for financial improprieties and was forced to take a leave from her local (where she was a Stern-appointed “interim president”), from SEIU’s California state council (where Stern helped her replace Rosselli as chairperson), and her new International union job (another 2008 gift from the SEIU president).

Also absent from this week’s conference call to decide the fate of UHW will be Tyrone Freeman and Rickman Jackson, two more Stern protégés who became public embarrassments. They were elected to the IEB last June but removed shortly thereafter in the huge corruption scandal engulfing Local 6434 in Los Angeles, SEIU’s second largest affiliate. Freeman has since been kicked out of SEIU and ordered to pay back $1.1 million that he embezzled; he still faces likely criminal charges. Jackson was stripped of the Michigan local that Stern had awarded him, ordered to make restitution as well, and then exiled to Canada, where he is being given a “second-chance.”

Due to an unrelated scandal, former SEIU research department staffer, Tom Balanoff, now a Stern-installed national vice-president in Chicago, has been dodging reporters lately (although reportedly also cooperating with the FBI) about his wire-tapped conversations with the recently arrested Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois. Presumably, Balanoff will be voting this week on the future of UHW, along with a number of current SEIU headquarters staffers, who in most cases have never held any elected office in SEIU other than being on the board. One might reasonably wonder how SEIU presidential assistants or department heads like Kirk Adams, Eileen Kirlin, Stephen Lerner, or Debbie Schneider can be expected to cast an independent vote on questions related to UHW (or anything else) when Stern and Burger sign their paychecks and they serve in their regular jobs at the pleasure of the officers?

Deliberating with them will be board members whose own political empire building, unpopularity with dues-payers, or semi-retired status make them unlikely profiles in courage or free-thinkers either. One thinks here of Susana Segat, an ex-political operative now running a Boston local that lost several thousand members to the Mass Teachers Association because of her high-handed, Burger-backed methods. Or SEIU vice-president David Holway, a lawyer and ex-lobbyist, whose New England-based Local 5000 now has a license from Stern to gobble up smaller groups as far away as Georgia. Or their fellow Bostonian Celia Wcislo, who was put out to pasture when her local was absorbed by 300,000-member SEIU/1199 in New York, eliminating any further need for her services as an elected president of 25-years standing. Or former foundation official and environmentalist Jane McAlevey, whose brief reign as appointed director of SEIU Local 1107 in Nevada was so dysfunctional that she was forced out last June, while retaining her seat on the SEIU board.

And then there are all the SEIU janitor local leaders around the country who’ve never worked a day in their life as janitors but serve on the IEB anyway because of their past role as staffers or Stern-anointed trustees. The newest of these is Javier Morillo-Alicea, a former Macalester College history instructor who is gay, Latino, and now president of Minneapolis Local 26, where he worked briefly as an organizer. Morillo-Alicea is young, energetic, and much-admired locally. But does anyone expect him to buck his powerful SEIU patrons in Washington, D.C., when that means risking all that he’s acquired in a just few short years, including the Minnesota janitors’ franchise, an executive board position, and a Stern-created slot on SEIU’s new “ethics commission”? I wouldn’t bet money on Morilla-Alicea speaking out, unless he wants to have his local endure the same kind of headquarters’ assault that UHW has suffered and he, personally, is ready to return to the tenure track in academia.

The great irony of the cast of characters that Stern and Burger have assembled to administer the coup de grace to UHW is that, structurally, the SEIU board now resembles the ruling body of International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), before that union was democratized and reformed over the past twenty years. During the IBT’s mob-dominated past, its members had no right to elect top officers in a nationwide vote or elect, from their own region, the Teamster vice-presidents who make up the rest of the executive board. The only successful IEB candidates were all elected at-large, by delegates at leadership-dominated conventions, as part of slates formed by Teamster presidents (four of whom were indicted and three of whom went to jail in corruption scandals). Each of these pre-1989 Teamster chiefs would add or drop people from their leadership “team,” as needed, to insure executive board conformity with their wishes (using the additional carrot of a full Teamster salary, on top of any others, just for meeting attendance).

Beginning in 1991, thanks to the presence of TDU and the settlement of a federal racketeering lawsuit, the IBT has had a series of contested elections for the top leadership, and convention delegates only get to nominate the candidates. In each race, the president, secretary-treasurer, and some V-Ps have run “at large,” with all 1.4 million Teamsters eligible to vote for them. All other board members, representing regional constituencies, have had to campaign for election among a smaller number of rank-and-file voters who live and work in the same area they do. Almost all successful IEB candidates, whether liberal or conservative, “old guard” or reformer,” have been working members of the union, not appointed staffers; with the notable exception of current president James Hoffa, all previously served in lower-level elected positions.

Reflecting the IEB’s local union roots (and legal protections in the Teamster constitution), a bigger Teamster local can’t take over a smaller one without members of the latter voting to approve the merger. Although trusteeships were often used in the IBT’s bad old days to crush dissent, they have, since 1989, been mainly used to oust crooks. Tom Leedham, the progressive leader of a Portland, Oregon local, has run for international president three times as a TDU-backed candidate, sharply criticizing Hoffa’s leadership and always gaining 35 to 40 percent of the vote. Unlike Sal Rosselli, Stern’s leading foe in SEIU, Leedham has not faced the threat of trusteeship in retaliation for his dissent. As Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) organizer Ken Paff told The Los Angeles Times Dec. 30: “When your union [SEIU] is less democratic than the Teamsters, you have to look in the mirror and ask, ‘What happened?’”

More friends of SEIU should be asking this question. More labor-oriented academics should be doing some Sixties’-style “power structure research”-which means taking a closer look at “who rules SEIU,” how they do it, and what price workers pay for having such an unhealthy concentration of power and privilege at the top of their national union. And, finally, concerned trade unionists around the country should be coming to the aid of UHW, in its hour of need, before Andy Stern’s pending assault on SEIU dissidents backfires on all of organized labor, making the campaign for labor law reform a dead letter on Capitol Hill.
Steve Early is former CWA organizer who has been a supporter of Teamster reform and a commentator on Teamster politics since 1977. His recent reporting on labor has focused on SEIU, the subject of a forthcoming book. He is also the author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (Monthly Review Press, 2009).

Britain leaves Iraq in Shame

Obama was elected on the back of revulsion at Bush’s war, but greater pressure will be needed to force a full withdrawal. If British troops are indeed withdrawn from Iraq by next June, it will signal the end of the most shameful and disastrous episode in modern British history. Branded only last month by Lord Bingham, until recently Britain’s most senior law lord, as a “serious violation of international law”, the aggression against Iraq has not only devastated an entire country and left hundreds of thousands dead – it has also been a political and military humiliation for the invading powers.

In the case of Britain, which marched into a sovereign state at the bidding of an extreme and reckless US administration, the war has been a national disgrace which has damaged the country’s international standing. Britain’s armed forces will withdraw from Iraq with dishonour. Not only were they driven from Basra city last summer under cover of darkness by determined resistance, just as British colonial troops were forced out of Aden 40 years ago – and Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, before that. But they leave behind them an accumulation of evidence of prisoner beatings, torture and killings, for which only one low-ranking soldier, Corporal Payne, has so far been singled out for punishment.

It’s necessary to spell out this brutal reality as a corrective to the official tendency to minimise or normalise the horror of what has evidently been a criminal enterprise – enthusiastically supported by David Cameron and William Hague, it should be remembered, as well as Tony Blair and his government – and a reminder of the dangers of escalating the war that can’t be won in Afghanistan. It was probably just as well that the timetable for British withdrawal from Iraq was given in a background military briefing, after Gordon Brown’s earlier schedule for troop reductions was vetoed by George Bush.

But in any case, in the wake of Barack Obama’s election on a partial withdrawal ticket, the latest plans look a good deal more credible. They are also welcome, of course, even if several hundred troops are to stay behind to train Iraqis. It would be far better both for Britain and Iraq if there were a clean break and a full withdrawal of all British forces in preparation for a comprehensive public inquiry into the Iraq catastrophe. Instead, and in a pointer to the shape of things to come, British troops at Basra airport are being replaced by US forces.

Meanwhile, the real meaning of last month’s security agreement between the US and Iraqi governments is becoming clearer, as Obama’s administration-in-waiting briefs the press and officials highlight the small print. This “status of forces agreement”, which replaces the UN’s shotgun mandate for the occupation forces at the end of this month, had been hailed by some as an unequivocal deal to end the occupation within three years.

There’s no doubt that Iraq’s Green Zone government, under heavy pressure from its own people and neighbours such as Iran, extracted significant concessions from US negotiators to the blanket occupation licence in the original text. The final agreement does indeed stipulate that US forces will withdraw by the end of 2011, that combat troops will leave urban areas by July next year, contractors and off-duty US soldiers will be subject to Iraqi law and that Iraqi territory cannot be used to attack other countries.

The fact that the US was forced to make such commitments reflects the intensity of both Iraqi and American public opposition to the occupation, the continuing Iraqi resistance war of attrition against US forces, and Obama’s tumultuous election on a commitment to pull out all combat troops in 16 months. Even so, the deal was denounced as treason – for legitimising foreign occupation and bases – by the supporters of the popular Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, resistance groups and the influential Association of Muslim Scholars.

And since his November triumph, Obama has gone out of his way to emphasise his commitment to maintaining a “residual force” for fighting “terrorism”, training and protection of US civilians – which his security adviser Richard Danzig estimated could amount to between 30,000 and 55,000 troops.

Briefings by Pentagon officials have also made clear this residual force could remain long after 2011. It turns out that the new security agreement can be ditched by either side, while the Iraqi government is fully entitled to invite US troops to remain, as explained in the accompanying “strategic framework agreement”, so long as its bases or presence are not defined as “permanent”. And given that the current Iraqi government would be unlikely to survive a week without US protection, such a request is a fair bet. Combat troops can also be “re-missioned” as “support units”, it transpires, and even the last-minute concession of a referendum on the agreement next year will not, the Iraqi government now says, be binding.

None of this means there won’t be a substantial withdrawal of troops from Iraq after Obama takes over the White House next month. But how far that withdrawal goes will depend on the kind of pressure he faces both at home and in Iraq. The US establishment clearly remains committed to a long-term stewardship of Iraq. The Iraqi government is at this moment negotiating secret 20-year contracts with US and British oil majors to manage 90% of the country’s oil production. The struggle to end US occupation and control of the country is far from won.

The same goes for the wider shadow of the war on terror, of which Iraq has been the grisly centrepiece. Its legacy has been strategic overreach and failure for the US: from the rise of Iran as a regional power, the deepening imbroglio of the Afghan war, the advance of Hamas and Hizbullah and threat of implosion in Pakistan – quite apart from the advance of the nationalist left in Latin America and the growing challenge from Russia and China. But at its heart has been the demonstration of American weakness in Iraq, the three trillion-dollar war that helped drive the US economy into crisis.

No wonder the US elite has wanted a complete change of direction and Bush was last week reduced to mumbling his regrets about the “intelligence failure in Iraq”. For Obama, the immediate foreign policy tests are clear: if he delivers on Iraq, negotiates in Afghanistan and engages with Iran, he will start to justify the global hopes that have been invested in him. If not, he will lay the ground for a new phase of conflict with the rest of the world.

Seumas Milne

The Guardian

Whistleblower’s lawsuit

A whistleblower who helped instigate regulatory and media investigations of Kaiser Permanente’s troubled Northern California kidney-transplant unit has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, alleging that senior Kaiser medical-group officials ignored several warnings about mounting problems in the program. In early May, under pressure from federal and state authorities, Oakland-based Kaiser decided to shut the unit and transfer patients needing new kidneys to waiting lists at UCSF Medical Center and UC Davis Medical Center. The move came after examples of botched … paperwork, chaotic management practices and long delays for transplants reached the attention of regulators and the public.

According to the lawsuit filed by David Merlin, who was administrative head of the kidney unit for about two months in late 2005 and early this year, Kaiser’s kidney transplant program “was so poorly organized and unprofessionally managed that it failed to comply with state and federal requirements and was compromising patient care, leading to unnecessary suffering and possibly deaths.”

For many years prior to that, Kaiser had subcontracted kidney transplant work to the two University of California medical centers.

In the wrongful termination lawsuit, filed July 14, Merlin said he met with several senior San Francisco executives of the Permanente Medical Group (TPMG), the for-profit medical group that ran the transplant unit and contracts with Kaiser’s hospitals and health plan to provide clinical services in Northern California, in January and early February, raising concerns about the operation of the unit.

Merlin’s lawsuit said those executives — including Nancy Langholff, RN, assistant medical group administrator; Diane DeCorso, Langholff’s boss, and Dr. Nora Burgess, TPMG’s chief financial officer at the San Francisco hospital — ignored his attempts to bring severe ongoing problems in the unit to the organization’s attention, and declined to let him schedule a meeting with Bruce Blumberg, M.D., at the time the medical center’s physician-in-chief.

Instead, he was told to “shut up” about the problems, and to “let it go,” Merlin said.

Merlin, who had previously worked as an administrator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard University affiliate in Boston, as well as San Francisco’s Saint Francis Memorial Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital, filed his wrongful termination suit in San Francisco Superior Court. It asks for at least $5 million in damages.

Shortly before the filing of the lawsuit, Kaiser spokesman Matthew Schiffgens described Merlin’s charges that senior officials ignored problems in the unit as “allegations,” adding, “if he has any concrete examples of the issues he’s raising, we’d be willing to address them.” As of July 17, “we have not been officially served with the complaint,” Schiffgens said, adding “we’re not to going to litigate or advance our litigation strategy in the media.”

More broadly, Schiffgens said, Kaiser continues to work with regulators to transfer patients to the UC medical centers, care for life-threatened renal patients in the San Francisco unit, and review the situation. “There is still a continuing internal review of the kidney transplant program,” Schiffgens said July 12, including “how the actual program operated (along with) administrative and communications issues.”

But a formal internal investigation, promised in the early days after the transplant unit’s woes hit the front pages, was discontinued after Kaiser decided — under pressure from regulators — to shutter the kidney unit, Schiffgens told the San Francisco Business Times. “That work has been put on hold,” he said, while Kaiser focuses on the specifics of running the unit and transferring patients to the non-Kaiser medical centers for transplants. “At some point in the future, we can revisit that.”
Regulators report

After being terminated by Kaiser in early February, Merlin took his case to the news media — including the Los Angeles Times and KPIX, CBS TV-Channel 5 in San Francisco. He also contacted a number of state and federal regulators, including the California Department of Managed Health Care, U.S. Department of Justice and the Medical Board of California, which licenses physicians, spending hours with top-level investigators and executives. Several DMHC officials and investigators talked to him by phone, for example, the agency confirmed. The result, starting in early May, was a flood of news accounts and regulatory moves that forced Kaiser to reconsider its plans.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, released a report on June 23 that appears to support a number of Merlin’s allegations about quality and management problems. That report alleged the unit was understaffed, its record keeping and training were inadequate or nonexistent, and that some patients weren’t matched up with donor kidneys, even when perfect matches were available. Patients received confusing information in many cases, and many complaints were ignored or lost.

Kaiser officials said in their June 22 CMS correction plan they didn’t agree with or acknowledge the accuracy of the federal agency’s long list of alleged operational and managerial deficiencies in the kidney unit, and declined to acknowledge any mistakes or take responsibility or liability for them.

A similar report from the Department of Managed Health Care is expected by month-end, and insiders at the agency say a significant monetary fine against Kaiser — possibly the largest ever levied by the state agency — will be part of DMHC’s response. That penalty could be significantly higher than the previous record fine of $1 million, according to an informed DMHC insider.

Since the Los Angeles Times and CBS TV broke the story in early May, a number of top Kaiser officials connected to the kidney program have left their positions. Michael Alexander, CEO of Kaiser’s San Francisco Medical Center, which houses the unit, announced plans to retire last month. Dr. Bruce Blumberg, the hospital’s physician-in-chief during the two years problems in the kidney unit festered, left that position in recent weeks to move into the San Francisco medical center’s genetics unit, a shift that sources say was not related to the kidney unit’s woes and had been planned for some time. And Dr. Sharon Inokuchi, who at various times had been the kidney unit’s medical director and administrative head, was relieved of administrative duties “several months ago,” according to Kaiser, and is now working as a practicing nephrologist, or kidney specialist, in the unit, which is in the process of being shut down.

So far, however, no senior executives in the Permanente Medical Group, which ran the unit, have left or been reprimanded. And except for the first days after the issue came to light, TPMG executives have repeatedly deflected questions on the medical group’s role, leaving Mary Ann Thode, president of Kaiser’s Northern California hospital and health-plan units, to bear the brunt of public scrutiny.

A number of critics, including Merlin and former Kaiser, California Medical Association and Deloitte Consulting senior researcher Ruth Given, contend that TPMG’s role was central to the kidney unit.

The medical group, unlike the rest of Kaiser, is a for-profit enterprise that splits profits among its physician partners. Critics say that gives an incentive for the group to bring services in-house for financial reasons, sometimes to the detriment of enrollees. In addition, critics say, Kaiser’s emphasis on “population health” — meaning providing cost-effective care for the greatest number of enrollees — carries within it some risk that the interests of individual patients could be compromised in an attempt to stretch health-care dollars across a broad spectrum of care.

That appears to have been one of the factors leading Kaiser executives to take steps that put some individual patients at risk, with the goal of ultimately benefiting the greater good, Given said. This “may at least partially explain TPMG’s unwillingness to respond to (patient and family) complaints in a timely manner — or apparently at all — if the media had not gotten involved.”

As Kaiser has done for a number of weeks, Schiffgens declined to make other Kaiser officials available, including Robert Pearl, M.D., chief executive officer of the 6,000-doctor medical group, or other senior TPMG officials. “I have been the spokesman for the program,” Schiffgens said, “and I don’t see that changing going forward.”

A rollout gone wrong?

Merlin said he’s convinced that the kidney unit’s highly publicized woes are indicative of much deeper management and structural flaws within the giant HMO, which has more than 8.5 million enrollees nationwide, more than three-quarters of them in California.

He said Kaiser planned to use the San Francisco unit as the template for a series of kidney and other transplant centers nationwide that would save the organization huge amounts of money by not sending them to non-Kaiser hospitals for their transplants.

“I have every reason to believe they’re going to resurrect this (model),” Merlin said. “They want to build a strong template to roll out in the other eight states. … They said it would save Kaiser hundreds of millions of dollars” to handle organ transplants in-house.

Kaiser’s Schiffgens said he is “not aware” of such a broader strategy. The San Francisco-based Northern California kidney transplant unit is “the only (transplant program) that was ever brought in-house,” he said.

Other sources, including some within Kaiser, say Kaiser’s corporate culture and the influence of its powerful medical group, contributed to a reluctance to address these issues directly and publicly.

Considering that Kaiser’s own “Principles of Permanente Medicine” guidelines hold the system’s physicians responsible for directing all clinical decisions and designing and operating care delivery within the organization, said Given, a former Kaiser research specialist, “it is particularly puzzling to me that there has been no official public statement from TPMG about (its) role in this entire fiasco.”

Critics say the powerful influence of Kaiser’s doctors within the organization is little known to the public or to regulators, and that financial incentives sometimes result in clinical decisions that can put some patients in jeopardy. A senior Kaiser source blamed the situation on internal power struggles and cultural change within what the source called “a doctor’s culture.”

The physicians “manage to stay out of things,” the Kaiser source said, “but the doctors are key. They’re the ones that really control the huge part of the money.”

Chris Rauber

Whistleblower settles lawsuit over abrupt firing

David Merlin, the former administrative director of Kaiser Permanente’s troubled Northern California kidney transplant unit, has settled his wrongful termination lawsuit against Kaiser following a Dec. 18 arbitration hearing.

Merlin lost his job in February 2006 after eight weeks, following his questioning the safety, management and oversight of the unit by Kaiser and its Permanente Medical Group. The suit, filed in mid-July in San Francisco Superior Court and seeking at least $5 million in damages, said the transplant program “was so poorly organized and unprofessionally managed that it failed to comply with state and federal requirements and was compromising patient care, leading to unnecessary suffering and possibly deaths.”

Merlin also brought his concerns to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) and other regulators, and to the news media, resulting in a series of huge fines, scathing regulatory reports and media scrutiny of the transplant center’s woes.

Matthew Schiffgens, Kaiser’s spokesman on the transplant issue, confirmed that the Oakland-based health-care giant had settled the case, without providing any further details.

San Francisco Business Times.

It’s been less than two weeks since Obama’s election. Speculation is already rife about the change he intends to bring to Washington’s intelligence community. The Washington Post reported last week that Obama is expected to replace the country’s top two intelligence officials over their support for controversial Bush administration policies like torture and electronic surveillance. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA chief Michael Hayden reportedly wish to remain on the job. No appointees have been named as yet, but questions are already being raised about the people heading Obama’s transition efforts on intelligence policy.

John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading the review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration. Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq.

I’m joined now by Washington, D.C.—in D.C. by former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center’s National Security Project. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is also co-author of Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk.

We’re joined here in New York by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. His latest book is The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to start with Mel Goodman in Washington. Long years at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. You’ve just written an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun that looks at these two top transition officials. Explain who they are and what they represent.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think it’s important to understand who John Brennan is. He—[no audio]

AMY GOODMAN: We seem to have lost the sound, Mel Goodman. Let’s see if we—if we have it back. Mel, can you hear us?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Can you hear me?

AMY GOODMAN: Hi. Can you hear us, Mel Goodman?

MELVIN GOODMAN: I can hear you fine.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, good. Now we hear you fine. So just start from the top. Talk about Brennan.

MELVIN GOODMAN: OK. John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war, so he sat there at Tenet’s knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.

Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director for Intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war. So she went along with the phony intelligence estimate of October 2002, the phony white paper that was prepared by Paul Pillar in October 2002. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations—[inaudible] 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.

So, when George Tenet said, “slam dunk, we can provide all the intelligence you need,” [inaudible] to the President in December of 2002, it was people like Jami Miscik and John Brennan who were part of the team who provided that phony intelligence. So what I think people at the CIA are worried about—and I’ve talked to many of them over the weekend—is that there will never be any accountability for these violations and some of the unconscionable acts committed at the CIA, which essentially amount to war crimes, when you’re talking about torture and abuse and secret prisons. So, where are we, in terms of change? This sounds like more continuity.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to excerpts from a December 2005 interview with John Brennan, the former CIA official now leading Obama’s intelligence transition. Brennan was interviewed by Margaret Warner on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about his views on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition.

MARGARET WARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now for the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in, and I can say, without a doubt, that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it—are you saying both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And US government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARET WARNER: Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHN BRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptians then have a longer history, in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I’ve talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services—and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia—that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.

John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right—and there were a few who tried to get it right—is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama’s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what we’re learning now.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, NPR attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, then you have to wonder who he’s relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO, bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon’s procurement project, an item that we’ve spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is—again, this is not change; this is continuity.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, as you listen to John Brennan, again, heading up the transition team on intelligence, your thoughts?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it’s extremely, extremely disturbing. When you read Jane Mayer’s book, the worst and most onerous chapter is the chapter on what the CIA did to people in secret sites, from small coffins to waterboarding. John Brennan was there at the time. To hear him say that this stuff works is really—or that it’s very important to do is really remarkable. He’s saying that at the same time when we know about the Center’s client, Maher Arar, being sent to Syria, tortured, so-called diplomatic assurances somehow able to protect him. Another Guantanamo people—other Guantanamo people sent to Egypt with the worst kind of torture. So, the idea that Brennan, who should probably, along with Tenet, be facing some kind of war crimes trial, is actually heading the transition on this is extremely disturbing.

AMY GOODMAN: And Jamie Miscik, Mel Goodman, talk about her significance.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director—she was the Deputy Director of Intelligence during the run-up to the war and in the immediate postwar period. That was a period of politicized intelligence. That was a period of the corruption of the process. That was a period when all analytic trade craft, all of the rules of analytic trade craft were ignored. She passed judgment on the October 2002 estimate. She passed on the white paper, which was the phony paper that violated the CIA charter, because it took classified material and then declassified it and sent to the Congress only days before the vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002.

She was part of the slam-dunk team that George Tenet was so proud of that prepared a phony—not only that phony estimate, but the speech that Colin Powell gave, that outrageous speech with twenty-eight allegations, all of them false, prepared in February of 2003, which was the case to the international community. Hundreds of millions of people heard that phony speech, and it’s still an embarrassment to Colin Powell to this very day. She was part of the team that allowed George Bush to go before this country in January of 2003 in a State of the Union address and use a fabricated intelligence report to say that Iraq was getting enriched uranium from a West African country. Jami Miscik was a part of all of this.

And a lot of us were very pleased when Porter Goss actually fired Jami Miscik. My guess is he probably fired her for the wrong reasons and not the right reasons, but we were glad to see her go.

And now, for Obama to turn around, put Jami Miscik back in the CIA in transition and Brennan in the transition process, and then you look at people such as the former deputy to Tenet, John McLaughlin, who is also an intelligence adviser, and Rob Richer, who was a key operations adviser, who was the deputy to Jose Rodriguez, who is now being investigated by the Justice Department for the illegal destruction of the torture tapes, you know, you have to wonder, who is Obama relying on for advice on the Washington community? He’s only been in Washington, we know, for two years, and obviously there are things he needs to know about national security, the CIA and the intelligence community. And obviously, he’s listening to the wrong people.

AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us, former CIA and State Department analyst. His latest book is called Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

www.democracynow.org

“The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal,” says Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine. World leaders from nearly two dozen countries met in Washington over the weekend to discuss plans to increase regulation of international financial activity. They acknowledged that a failure of market oversight in countries like the United States had precipitated the financial crisis. Meanwhile, here at home, it’s been a month into the Bush administration’s more than $700 billion bank bailout. Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a new bailout strategy intended to boost consumer borrowing and promote financing for companies that give out loans. President-elect Obama’s transition team is reportedly working on improving the management of the bailout come January 20th.

But that’s two months away and according to the Washington Post, with $290 billion already committed, the Bush administration has taken no action to fill congressionally-mandated independent positions to oversee how the bailout is used.

According to Naomi Klein’s latest article in The Nation, “The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.” The article is called “In Praise of a Rocky Transition.”

Naomi Klein, investigative journalist, author of The Shock Doctrine, joins us now from Toronto, Canada.

Watch part 1/3

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thanks so much, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: “Criminal”? Explain.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, there’s a few elements now that are being described as illegal that we’re finding out. First of all, the equity deals that were negotiated with the largest banks and also some smaller banks, representing $250 billion worth of the bailout money, this is the deal to inject equity into the banks in—to inject capital into the banks in exchange for equity. The idea was to address the so-called credit crunch to get banks lending again. The legislation that enabled this was quite explicit that it had to encourage lending. Barney Frank, who was one of the architects of that legislation, has said that it violates the act if the money is not going to that purpose and is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers. He said that violates the acts, i.e. it’s illegal. But what we know is that it’s going precisely to those purposes. It is going to bonuses. It is going to shareholders. And it is not going to lending. The banks have been quite explicit about this. Citibank has talked about using the money to buy other banks.

Then there’s other aspects of this that are borderline illegal. We found out that in the midst of the crisis, the Bush—the Treasury Department pushed through a tax windfall for the banks, a piece of legislation that allows the banks to save a huge amount of money when they merge with each other. And the estimate is that this represents a loss of $140 billion worth of tax revenue for the US government. Many tax attorneys who were interviewed by the Washington Post said that they felt that the way in which the Treasury Department went about this by unilaterally changing the tax code was illegal, that this had to be—this had to include Congress. Congress only found out about it after the fact.

There’s another piece of this puzzle that is also borderline illegal, which is that in addition to the $700 billion that we are discussing, the $700 billion bailout, there’s another $2 trillion that’s been handed out by the Federal Reserve in emergency loans to financial institutions, to banks, that actually we don’t really know who they’re handing the money out to, because, apparently, it’s a secret. They could be handing it out to a range of other corporations—I think they are—but they’re saying that they won’t disclose who has received these taxpayer loans, because it could cause a run on the banks, it could cause the market to lose confidence in the institutions that have taken these loans. Once again, that represents an additional $2 trillion.

The other thing that the Fed won’t disclose is what they have accepted as collateral in exchange for these loans. This is a really key point, because, of course, at the heart of the financial crisis is—are these so- called distressed assets. The value of these assets is enormously controversial. They may be worth very little. So if the Fed has accepted distressed assets as collateral in exchange for these loans, there’s a very good chance the taxpayers aren’t going to be getting this money back. So Bloomberg News has launched a lawsuit in federal court to find out who has received the loans and what has been accepted as collateral, because they believe that this lack of transparency is illegal. So that’s why we’re calling this the “trillion-dollar crime scene” or the “multi-trillion-dollar crime scene.” And they’re really challenging lawmakers to call them out, the Treasury is.

And I think, you know, Amy, the last time I was on Democracy Now!, we were talking about Henry Paulson’s original three-page proposal, the $700 trillion stickup, where he basically said, “Give me $700 trillion. Don’t ask any questions. I can never be challenged by any arm of government or any court of law.” Now, that aspect of the bailout was supposedly dealt with, and we were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality. But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this, because they’re afraid of causing a run on the banks, of causing more market instability. So, essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, you know, “We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the great depression.” And the Democrats, not known for their firm spines, have so far failed to challenge them in anything other than rhetoric.

Watch Part 2/3

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s very interesting about this, of course, as I talked to you before the election, but now the election is over, and the Democrats are not in a weaker position, but in a far more powerful position, and they are meeting this week.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. They actually—they have a lot of leeway in which to act on this. You know, if Barney Frank means what he says, that this violates the act, then of course they can challenge the deals that have already been signed, these terrible equity deals that are so much worse than what Gordon Brown negotiated in Britain. I mean, let’s remember, Gordon Brown got voting rights at the banks that they bailed out, seats on the boards, 12 percent dividends for US tax—for UK taxpayers, as opposed to the five percent negotiated in the US and no voting rights and no seats on the board. Other thing Gordon Brown did is he got it in writing that the banks had to start lending, as opposed to Henry Paulson, who didn’t get it in writing, and the banks are not lending.

So, there is room to move, but, you know, the logic that has really gripped lawmakers is that they can’t rock the boat. And we hear this across the board, really, in the talk of, you know, who to appoint as Treasury Secretary, how to approach economic policy in this period. We hear all these phrases—you know, continuity, smooth transition. And really, that’s code for more of the same, because what the market wants is for there not to be tough regulation, is for the free money to keep flowing. What will upset the market, what will create a rocky transition, is if it’s clear that there’s a new sheriff in town, that they’re going to have to follow the law, that they’re going to cut off all of this corporate welfare, there’s going to be real accountability, real conditions attached to the money. You know what? The market really doesn’t want that.

Unfortunately for the market, voters have just voted for change. They voted for a candidate who really turned the election into a referendum on this economic policy of rampant deregulation. So you’ve really got a problem here. How do you reconcile the market’s desire for status quo with the voters’ demand for real change? There is no way to do that without a few bumps along the way. And I’m quite concerned that what we’re seeing from Obama’s team is an accepting of this logic that they need to give the market what it wants, which is continuity, smooth transition, which is really just code for more of the same. And when you hear names like Larry Summers being bandied about for Treasury Secretary, that’s feeding the market exactly what it wants, which is more of the same.

Watch Part 3/3

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I wanted to go more to these—what you’re calling “borderline criminal” deals, the Washington Post revealing as part of the bailout, lawmakers changed Tax Code Section 382, which limits the kinds of tax shelters companies can use to—during corporate mergers, created to stop companies who avoid paying taxes by acquiring shell companies valued by the losses on their stocks. And then, going on in the piece, it says congressional aides admitted lawmakers agreed to keep the change hidden to avoid public outrage. Staffers with Senate Finance Committee chair, Max Baucus, a Democrat, reportedly asked that an administration briefing on the tax code change be kept secret. One congressional aide said, “We’re all nervous about saying this was illegal because of our fears about the marketplace. To the extent we want to try to publicly stop this, we’re going to be gumming up some important deals.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. I mean, this is—that’s an incredible statement, Amy, because really what they’re saying is, we can’t afford to enforce the law, because there is an economic crisis, that somehow, because there’s an economic prices, legality is a luxury that Congress can’t afford. That is a very scary statement. But this is what I mean by this logic that you have to—you know, the market, particularly a bear market, has the temperament of an ill-tempered two-year-old. I mean, it throws temper tantrums whenever it doesn’t get what it wants, whenever it is frightened. So it is really dangerous to pander to the tastes of the market in this period. It needs a little bit of tough love. That’s what people have voted for. But there will be a temper tantrum if there is a clear message that the law is going to be followed.

So, we find out that there has been this backdoor, illegal tax break handed over to the banks. And, by the way, Amy, this is an example, a classic example, of what I call disaster capitalism or the shock doctrine—right?—where the banks had been pushing for this tax break for many, many years, they weren’t able to get it through during normal circumstances, but in a crisis they push it through the back door when everybody is focused on—well, at the point that they pushed this through, which was September 30th, this was the worst of the economic crisis and people were focused on the collapse of Lehman, and they were focused on the fact that they couldn’t get the bailout legislation through. So nobody even noticed this until it was too late.

And so, this is what I mean by the strategy of the Bush administration, is now they are saying to Congress, “We dare you to stand in the way of these bank mergers, because if you do that”—because the tax break that they handed out is what encouraged a wave of bank mergers. And I really do think it is worth pausing to question this idea that what Treasury should be doing at this point is encouraging very large bank mergers, because one of the other problems that, you know, is at the root of this crisis, and certainly at the root of this unprecedented bailout, is that you have so many banks that are considered too big to fail, right? So why is it that we are not questioning this solution, the so-called solution to the crisis, which is creating even bigger banks, banks that will, once again, be too big to fail?

We’re really heading to a future where there will be, you know, three or four large banks, all of them too big to fail, which means that if they take more—they take more and more risks, which nobody is asking them not to. It’s important to understand that in exchange for the bailout money, the banks are not being told that they can’t carry the incredible leverage rates that we saw, for instance, at Bear Stearns, thirty-three to one. They aren’t being told that they can’t invest in these high-risk, complex financial instruments. They can still do whatever they want, but now they’re even bigger, which means that if they get themselves into trouble again, they will be bailed out again. So why is it that the government is cutting their taxes to encourage these mergers? The Democrats are saying, “Well, we can’t do anything now, because if we do, we will gum up these deals.” So I think we should question all of it. Across the board, I think the assumptions are faulty.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, we have to break. but we’re going to come back to this discussion. I also want to talk to you about your piece in the Rolling Stone, “The Bailout Profiteers.” And after that, we’ll be joined by a former CIA analyst and the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights to talk about President-elect Obama’s transition team, when it comes to intelligence, deeply involved in the whole issue of the politicization of intelligence in the lead-up to war and in justifying the renditions. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll be back with Naomi Klein in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: […] We’re also broadcasting across Canada on community radio stations, where Naomi Klein is, in Canada, in Toronto, the award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, author of the bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her last piece in The Nation is called “In Praise of a Rocky Transition.” And the piece before that is in Rolling Stone; it’s called “The Bailout Profiteers.” Naomi Klein, lay them out.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, what I do in the Rolling Stone piece is talk about the really uncomfortable parallels between what we saw in Iraq in the Green Zone and what we’re seeing in the US Treasury. It’s sort of the Green Zoning of the US Treasury. If we think about the way the Bush administration handled the occupation of Iraq, the working assumption was that everything that could be privatized, everything that could be outsourced, would be outsourced. And it has been very much a corporate war, as you well know. But at the same time, the handing out of the contracts in the early days was done very, very quickly, because, of course, there was this manufactured emergency that we all know was based on lies, in retrospect. But that was used, that state of emergency was used to justify no-bid contracts, to justify the fact that there was very little oversight of the contractors.

And we’re seeing all of this repeat now, but just on such a massive scale, such a larger scale. First of all, when Henry Paulson and Neel Kashkari, his deputy, announced the $700 billion bailout, they also announced that they would be outsourcing all of the work. They have handed out the work to many of the banks and Wall Street law firms that really created the crisis in the first place. But in the same way, there’s also been very little competition for these contracts. They were handed out very quickly. And at the same time, as we were discussing earlier, there is very little oversight over the process.

So, just to give you one example that I discuss in the Rolling Stone piece, there’s the general contractor, the really big contracting—it’s kind of the Halliburton of Treasury contracts—went to the bank, Bank of New York Mellon. Bank of New York Mellon, by the way, is one of the nine banks that got the equity deals, the cash injections in exchange for equity. And they are also very deep in this derivatives mess themselves, but they have been hired to handle a huge part of the bailout. So what I argue in the piece is that we actually have it backwards. It’s not the banks that have been partially nationalized; it’s Treasury that has been partially privatized by the very banks that created the crisis in the first place.

One of the things that’s really extraordinary about the Bank of New York Mellon contract is that, unlike the Halliburton contract or the Bechtel contract or the Blackwater contract, we actually don’t know how much it’s worth. It’s quite extraordinary. It’s redacted. The part of the contract that would tell taxpayers how much of their money is being given to this bank and how they’re calculating the payment for Bank of New York Mellon is all blacked out. I was reassured by Treasury three weeks ago that they would be disclosing that information within days. They still haven’t disclosed it.

Another contract that I look into in the Rolling Stone piece is for the first law firm that received a contract to advise Treasury on the equity deals, on those key equity deals that we’ve now found out are such bad deals, the ones that didn’t get it in writing that the banks were supposed to start lending, the ones that only got five percent dividends for US taxpayers when Britain got 12 percent. Well, the bank that got the—sorry, the law firm that got the contract to advise Treasury is called Simpson Thacher Bartlett. This is a Wall Street heavy-hitter firm. They’ve negotiated some of the largest bank mergers in recent years. And what we discovered in researching this piece is that Bank of—is that Simpson Thacher had represented seven of the nine banks that received the equity deals that they were advising Treasury on. And, you know, what’s important to understand is that these banks that Simpson Thacher represents on other matters represent far more of their revenue than US Treasury. So what I am arguing is that they are in a very large conflict of interest, because they really are a bankers’ law firm, not a public interest law firm.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, can you talk about what is happening right now in Washington, what took place over the weekend, the meeting of the G20?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, you know, this was an epic lost opportunity, Amy, because I think a lot of people assume, certainly assumed originally, that what would come out of this catastrophe, what would come out of this crisis, would be a re-examination of some of the thinking that has underpinned so much of economic policy in the past thirty years. And, as I said earlier, Barack Obama turned his election campaign into a referendum on the mania for deregulation and free trade and really less trickle-down economics. He said the idea of giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down to the people below, and that really resonated with voters, and they elected him on that platform. And let’s remember, Amy, because this really is about democracy, that his campaign turned around when the economic crisis really hit Wall Street. He was losing ground to McCain when the crisis hit Wall Street, and Obama started using this language of really putting the ideology of deregulation on trial. That’s when his numbers turned around. That’s when he went on his winning streak that took him all the way to Election Day. And so, I think that there has been this assumption that, OK, now we’re going to fix it.

But if we look at what just came out of the G20 summit, it’s really been a reassertion of the very—this very ideology of deregulation. On the one hand, you have the statement that you started the program with, where the world leaders said that this crisis was born of the shadow banking industry, not enough oversight, not enough regulation, too much complexity. At the same time, when they talk about solutions, they’re calling for resurrecting the failed World Trade Organization talks that collapsed this summer. And we heard, if you recall, this summer, when the Doha talks collapsed, that globalization and the Washington Consensus were dead, because developing countries had rejected it.

The other thing that they’re calling for is a greater role for the International Monetary Fund. And it’s important to understand that the reason why the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and the whole free trade agenda, generally, has been in collapse in recent years is because countries around the world are no longer willing to accept the conditions attached to joining this club, the conditions attached to an International Monetary Fund loan. In reasserting a greater role for the International Monetary Fund, in calling for the World Trade Organization talks to get back on track, these world leaders are actually calling for more financial market deregulation, more of the same.

I’ll give you one example: the Doha talks. Although much of the focus has been on agricultural subsidies, part of the Doha talks is about financial sector deregulation and the push, particularly from Britain and the United States, for countries like China and India to open up their financial services markets to US and British and European companies who want into these markets. And what’s really striking is that you hear this language of anti-protectionism, you know, that we can’t turn away from free trade. What this really means, Amy, is that Citibank and Barclays want to go into China, want to go into India, and they want to buy up Chinese and Indian banks, they want to get into these markets. But what’s so incredible in this moment is the hypocrisy, just the rampant hypocrisy, because Barclays and Citibank and all of the other banks that would benefit from this type of free trade are of course the very banks that are receiving massive state protection from their own governments in the form of the bailouts that we’ve just been discussing. So these sort of corporate welfare bums now want to use the language of anti-protectionism to go into other countries and buy up their assets, but, of course, they are being subsidized so heavily by their own taxpayers. So it’s a moment of high hypocrisy.

It’s also a moment of, as I said at the beginning, lost opportunities, because—just to give you one example, think about what these leaders could do if they really wanted to, in terms of collaborating to harmonize regulation, so that banks were no longer able to pit governments against each other for who could offer the lowest taxes, who could give them the best tax havens, who could offer the lowest regulation. There was just a hearing on Friday about hedge funds that Henry Waxman convened. And before those hearings, we heard from one of the wealthiest hedge fund owners in the country, Ken Griffin, who’s actually an Obama supporter. Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund owner—he owns Citadel Investment—was asked by the committee whether he believed that hedge funds were sufficiently regulated and whether they should be more highly taxed. What Ken Griffin said was that if that happened, there would be even more jobs in the financial industry in the United States lost to Britain. And he talked about how his heart breaks when he goes to Canary Wharf in London and sees how many good jobs have been lost to Britain, which has, in many ways, lower—less regulation of hedge funds.

But what’s so striking about that, Amy, is that it would be so easy in this moment for the US government and the British government to actually harmonize their regulations so that they could—so that companies like Citadel Investment and other hedge funds would really have nowhere to run. And when you have a crisis like this, which so clearly shows the need for those types of regulations, when you have an election like there just was in the United States, where people have said clearly that this is a priority, the leaders have an opportunity to act and to close down these tax havens, to prevent this ability of governments to be pitted against one another, and have a race to the top as opposed to a race to the bottom. But they blew that opportunity, and they actually called for less regulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Just underscoring what you wrote on the whole issue of the difference in the bailouts, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown extracting meaningful guarantees for taxpayers, voting rights on banks, seats on their boards, 12 percent in annual dividend payments to the government, a suspension of dividend payments to shareholders, restrictions on executive bonuses, a legal requirement banks lend money to homeowners and small businesses. Here in the United States, Washington Post reporting major US banks are on pace to spend more than half their bailout money on rewarding their shareholders. The thirty-three banks are set to receive some $163 billion in government bailouts; half of that sum will go to paying off shareholders over the next three years.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, this bailout is really not a bailout at all; it’s a parting gift to the people that the Bush—that George Bush once referred to jokingly as “my base.” You know, in one of my columns recently, I likened it to what European colonial rulers used to do when they finally realized they had to hand over power; they would loot the treasury on the way out the door.

And the reason why there has been this dramatic change in policy just in recent days, where Henry Paulson has said, “OK, well, we’re not going to do what we originally had said at all,” which is use the bailout money to buy distressed assets, to buy bad debts, “Now we’re going to go from these equity deals with the banks to bailing out credit card companies”—the reason for that is that that first $250 billion was essentially money down the drain. They are admitting that it didn’t do what it was supposed to do, which was increase lending. So, now they’re making it up as they go along. It’s take three, take four, take five. But we’re supposed to somehow not notice that $250 billion, an astronomical sum, was just wasted, going to bonuses, going to shareholder payouts, going to CEO salaries. And now they’re trying another method to get lending going. But it really was the parting gift, Amy.

And if we think about what this money means, and this is—you know, this crisis isn’t over, and the same people who justified this bailout, who clamored for this bailout, are the very people who are going to turn around and say to Barack Obama, “We can’t afford for you to make good on your election promises. We can’t afford universal healthcare. In fact, we can’t afford what meager services Americans get in exchange for their tax dollars, like Social Security payments.” We’re already hearing this lowering of expectations now in the national discourse. So, the money—this really is, you know, reverse Robin Hood gone mad. The money has been given to the people who needed it least, and it’s going to be used to justify austerity measures imposed against those who need it most. It’s going to be used to justify cuts to food stamps. It’s going to be used to justify cuts to Social Security, to healthcare, let alone being used to justify why more ambitious plans for a national healthcare program, for green energy are not affordable. So people have to be ready for this. You know, the next shock is yet to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Your final thought, this, on the bailing out of the auto industry, the Big Three in Detroit, starting with General Motors?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, obviously, it shouldn’t be a blank check. You know, I always think about what the International Monetary Fund does when developing countries come and ask for a loan. Think about what they’re doing right now. The International Monetary Fund says, “You want a loan? Well, here’s our list of conditions.” They used to call it structural adjustment. The same thing could be done to the auto industry. If they’re coming for a bailout, they should be structurally adjusted, and taxpayers should be playing IMF to the auto industry and insisting that they change the way they work, that they build green automobiles, that they protect jobs. It can’t simply be a blank check.

That said, what’s really disturbing is the way the Bush administration appears to be using the desire among Democrats to bail out the auto industry to horse trade the free trade deal with Colombia. You know, what we’re really seeing, Amy, is a resurrection of the entire free trade—discredited free trade agenda. This crisis being used—the shock of this crisis being used to resurrect all of these discredited deals. The Colombia free trade deal, the International Monetary Fund, the Doha round, they’re all coming back from the dead at precisely the moment that we should be actually burying, for good, this whole agenda of deregulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, author of the bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her latest piece is in The Nation; it’s called “In Praise of a Rocky Transition.” Before that, in Rolling Stone magazine, and that’s called “The Bailout Profiteers.” This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Naomi was speaking to us from the CBC TV studios in Toronto.

www.democracynow.org

You’ve heard that rule about never discussing politics at work? That’s so last election. These days, you would think that political talk was a job requirement. A survey at the start of the primary season by Office Team, a staffing agency based in Menlo Park, Calif., found that 67 percent of the 522 workers polled thought it was just fine to discuss politics in the office. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some silent types out there. Joni Daniels is one. A business consultant and meeting organizer in Manhattan, she has lots of opinions, but she keeps her political ones to herself.

“People are talking about politics everywhere,” she wrote by e-mail, “and I find it interesting to see how Republicans assume I’m like/agree with them and Democrats assume I’m like/agree with them. Since no one actually asks, I listen, nod, ask questions and my clients feel validated and respected.” Rachel Kempster used to feel that way, too — at least in the old days, which ended for her a few weeks ago. During the primaries, she says, she was “irked” by all the political chatter at DK Publishing in Manhattan, where she is a book publicist. “I’ve always believed that political talk doesn’t belong in the office,” she said.

But then Sarah Palin was named Mr. McCain’s running mate, and, oh, to listen to Ms. Kempster now. “I put an Obama poster on my office door,” she said. “Co-workers are sending around anti-Palin Web sites and I’m not bothered by it. Everyone around me is wearing their politics on their sleeve.”

Is all this political talk in the office a boon for the democratic process or a tyranny of the vocal over the taciturn? Depends, sometimes literally, where you sit. An administrative assistant in Fort Wayne, Ind., described in an e-mail message that where she sits is way too close to a loud Republican. “I lean left of center,” she wrote, adding that she tends to keep her views to herself. But the Republican, who is second in command at the office, sends mass e-mailings to the entire staff “slamming Obama, Clinton and Biden, and started distributing McCain yard signs out of his office last week,” she wrote.

And here is the real problem (and the reason she has asked to remain anonymous): “My immediate supervisor and this guy have been pals for years and are very close friends so I am keeping my mouth shut. I can’t simply find another job — it took me five years to find this one.”

The situation is just as uncomfortable at Elaine McIntyre’s department, which consists of 12 people in a nonprofit with 170 employees. During a recent meeting at a workplace that Ms. McIntyre described as “laid back,” one employee “lightly asserted that he thought all Republicans should die, claiming he disagreed with all their policies.” That led a co-worker to storm out. Confrontations and apologies followed, and everyone has been a little more subdued, she said. Crossing the line between healthy debate and rancor is deceptively easy in the workplace. Ken Vrana found himself stepping into the muck recently, not by shouting insults, but by simply chatting with a contractor who he assumed shared his views.

Mr. Vrana is the chief executive of the 1 in 8 Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Raleigh, N.C., that promotes early breast cancer detection. He describes himself as “a very political animal,” one who has worked for two presidents and whose involvement with Democrats goes back to Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He has always been free with his political views, he said, but “every once in a while I get surprised.” During a conversation with an artist the foundation had hired to create “an illustration of a very sexy, 50’s style pinup girl” for an upcoming project, he assumed that the artist shared his views.

“At one point,” he said, “I happened to mention my opinion of Sarah Palin and it went over like a lead balloon. Turns out she’s a big Palin fan.” He said he doesn’t think the incident “affected our working relationship in a negative way, but it did throw me.”

So, if the old way (say nothing political) is outdated, and the new way (say anything) may be offensive, what are the rules?

A few are legal, experts say. An employer may not pressure his employers to support, donate to or work for a particular candidate. Freedom of speech does not apply to a slogan-spouting worker whose boss asks him to avoid office political talk — as long as he is asking the same of other employees.

The rest is common sense. Jamie and Maren Showkeir, consultants specializing in workplace culture, and the authors of the book “Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment,” have some tips on what to avoid when engaging in political conversation in the office: don’t assume your co-workers share your political views and opinions; don’t abuse your power or position, avoid making politics personal; discuss rather than debate; and try to find common ground.

When political talk at work goes well, it can be everything conversation is supposed to be — an exchange of ideas that can result in illuminating moments for both parties. Anthony Commisso, who runs a formalwear shop in Latham, N.Y., had such an exchange with his newest employee, who is still a college student. Mr. Commisso said he tended to keep his opinions to himself in front of his customers, but his new employee was less reticent, and started sharing her political thoughts with a prospective bride and groom who were in the store to rent a tuxedo.

“Obama was too inexperienced and McCain had been around for so long he’ll know how to get it done,” Mr. Commisso recalled her saying.

Instead of lecturing her on keeping quiet in front of the customers, he joined the conversation. He reminded the young woman that while the man who had the job before her was, at 49, more experienced, and she was barely into her 20s, he “didn’t last a year” in the position, and here she was, practically running the shop. They have discussed — but not argued about — politics many times since then.

That is how it should be done, quietly and politely. So go off and play nicely. And remember to vote, or you don’t get to come into work on Nov. 5 and complain about who won.

LISA BELKIN

October 1, 2008 the New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO – Five healthcare workers and members of United Healthcare Workers-West have sued their Washington-based parent organization, Service Employees International Union, alleging violations of their federal rights to speak freely and to participate in union activities. The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, alleges SEIU President Andy Stern and other SEIU officials violated the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, which expressly gives “every member of any labor organization” the “right to meet and assemble freely with other members; and to express any views, arguments, or opinions.”

SEIU officials repeatedly have asked for the removal of a Web site, www.seiuvoice.org, a popular forum for nursing home, hospital and homecare workers to share information about their union and its members with each other and the public.

The suit alleges this and other conduct by SEIU officials is designed to “limit, inhibit and chill the exercise of their rights of free speech and equal participation as active members and advocates for democratic policies within their union.”

“I have been a supporter of this union for more than 30 years. This is the first time in all those years that I’ve felt threatened or intimidated because of my union activities,” said Rosie Byers, a plaintiff in the suit and a San Francisco-based home healthcare provider. “I can’t believe SEIU is trying to take away my voice, to silence me. This simply must stop.”

The suit alleges SEIU officials have coordinated these attacks against UHW members as part of a larger effort to silence any dissention at their June 2008 convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

“During the time I’ve been involved with this union, I’ve never been afraid to speak my mind,” said plaintiff Michael Torres, a respiratory therapist at USC University Hospital in Los Angeles. “It’s utterly ridiculous that we’re now forced to sue to ensure that we have a say in the future direction of UHW.”

The 150,000-member SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West is the largest and fastest-growing hospital and healthcare union in the western United States and represents every type of healthcare worker, including nurses, professional, technical and service classifications. Our mission is to achieve high-quality healthcare for all.

http://www.examiner.com

At a time when organized labor is slipping, SEIU’s national leaders are wasting their resources trying to discredit Sal Rosselli. By nearly every measure, the Service Employees International Union has become a juggernaut. As the rest of organized labor has seen its share of the American workforce continue to dwindle, SEIU has brought in some 800,000 new dues-paying members in recent years. With the Democratic Party taking over Congress in 2006, the 1.9 million-member organization, rich with campaign funds, wields enormous political clout, and it will only become more formidable if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wins the White House in November.

But all is not well inside the labor giant. Andy Stern, the union’s president, has pushed hard for merging and consolidating local chapters into larger operations — and many SEIU members, especially here on the West Coast, say that’s turning the union into a top-down autocracy in which Stern loyalists wield undue influence and meddling officials from Washington, DC squelch dissent.

And now, the Guardian has learned, Stern operatives are using their money and organizing clout in a hard-hitting campaign — not to force an employer to the table or to toss out an anti-union politician, but to discredit another labor leader.

The campaign is part of a bruising power struggle between Stern and dissident local leader Sal Rosselli, who runs the Oakland-based SEIU affiliate United Health Care Workers West. In the past few months, union insiders say, SEIU officials, including a senior assistant to Stern, set up what one leader called a “skunk team” to undermine Rosselli’s efforts at winning key union delegate elections. At one point, the team — which involved a political consulting firm linked to big downtown businesses — discussed an opposition research file compiled on Rosselli by a health-care giant his union was fighting

And leading up to the delegate elections last month, SEIU staffers worked to promote Stern-supporting candidates, possibly in violation of union rules, while actively discouraging other union employees from campaigning. That’s led to a formal complaint alleging improper involvement by Stern’s staff in a local union election.

EMERGING TENSIONS

In 2005, Thomas Dewar went to work as a press secretary at Local 790, formerly SEIU’s biggest San Francisco outlet, which represented approximately 30,000 workers, most of them public employees. Local 790 was among the most politically progressive union shops in the country, supporting left-leaning candidates for office and progressive causes like public power. In early 2007, Andy Stern initiated a merger of 790 with nine other regional locals. The move was part of a larger consolidation in the state that saw the number of California union affiliates reduced by nearly half.

The new Northern California superlocal was dubbed 1021, as in “10 to one.” Local 1021 has continued 790’s liberal activism. But right after the merger was finalized, Dewar and other sources told the Guardian, the atmosphere around the union changed for the worse.

“A lot of members had anxiety,” Dewar recounted. Most troubling, he said, was the insertion of Stern appointees into leadership positions, including current president Damita Davis-Howard. “Members were upset. They saw co-workers whom they had elected unilaterally removed by a guy in DC and replaced by his handpicked appointments.”

Ed Kinchley, a Local 1021 member who was appointed by Stern to the local’s executive board after the consolidation, shared Dewar’s memory of the tensions. “You had 10 different locals with 10 different ways of doing things. It’s difficult to merge all of that. A lot of people who had been elected to leadership positions were removed.”

Dewar told us he struggled to adjust to his new working environment. But after his initial misgivings, he said he devoted himself to backing Stern’s vision for the combined local: “We were told over and over that change is hard. So I decided to give it an honest shot.” Dewar said he worked to get good press for 1021 and to build Davis-Howard’s profile.

But early this year, tensions between Rosselli and Stern flared — and according to Dewar, top staffers at 1021 began to focus more and more of their attention on the feud.

“They were freaking out about Sal,” he said.

Enraged at what he considered International meddling in the affairs of his Oakland-based local, United Healthcare Workers West, Rosselli resigned from SEIU’s executive committee in early February. He also began championing a “Platform for Change” to be voted on at the upcoming SEIU convention in June. Among other things, the Rosselli-backed slate of reforms would give local union outlets more say in proposed mergers and collective bargaining agreements. The platform, if approved, would also scrap the current delegate system for electing International officials and replace it with a one-member, one-vote structure.

According to Dewar’s account and to evidence obtained by the Guardian, top SEIU officials have been working overtime to counter Rosselli — even pushing the boundaries of the union’s own rules and colluding with political consultants who have often opposed organized labor.

‘THE ANTI-CHRIST’

In early March, Dewar said that in early March, Josie Mooney, a former Local 790 president who is now a top assistant to Stern, approached him about joining what she characterized as a “skunk team that Andy and I are putting together.” Dewar recalls Mooney telling him that the purpose of the team was to counter Rosselli’s increasing popularity with the rank and file, and to sink Rosselli’s platform for the convention.

Dewar told us that Mooney asked him to join the skunk team during a brunch meeting at the Fog City Diner in early March. An e-mail exchange he shared with us shows that he and Mooney discussed having brunch at the diner on March 1.

Mooney did not return numerous calls for comment and, through an SEIU spokesperson, she declined to speak for this article. But Dewar told us Mooney promised him at the brunch that his assistance in her efforts would win him positive attention from Stern. The team, she reportedly told him, was directly authorized by Stern and “that resources would not be a problem.”

Dewar said he vacillated about joining the team, torn about aiding what he considered to be an internal union smear squad. “In 1021, we’re conditioned to think that Sal Rosselli is the anti-Christ,” Dewar told us. “But even still, he was still a part of the same union.” A March 4 e-mail from Mooney’s SEIU e-mail account to Dewar shows her urging Dewar to make up his mind: “You have to give me your commitment. I am (as we speak) selling you at the highest levels. Don’t blow that .”

Dewar eventually agreed to join Mooney, Tom DeBruin — an elected vice president of SEIU International — and someone Dewar said Mooney referred to as the team’s “silent partner” for a dinner meeting.

E-mails from Mooney and other attendees show that the meeting took place March 10 at Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland.

Mooney’s “silent partner“ turned out to be Mark Mosher, of the enormously successful San Francisco consulting firm, Barnes, Mosher, Whitehurst, Lauter, and Partners (BMWL). John Whitehurst, another of the firm’s partners, also attended the dinner.

BMWL has worked for the SEIU since 2001. But its client roster also included Sutter Health and the Committee on Jobs. Both organizations have less-than-stellar reputations among organized labor. Nurses at 10 Bay Area Sutter hospitals recently walked off the job for a 10-day strike. The Committee on Jobs is one of the largest lobbying organizations for downtown San Francisco business interests and has fought against numerous union causes. Mosher told the Guardian by phone that, as of November of last year, the Committee is no longer a BMWL client.

THE ROSSELLI FILE

Dewar claims Sal Rosselli was the central topic of conversation at the dinner. At one point, he says, the participants discussed an “oppo research” file on Rosselli compiled by Sutter Health. The hospital giant has clashed repeatedly with Rosselli and apparently had sought to dig up dirt on him.

Whitehurst worked for Sutter in the 1990s. His efforts for the hospital chain during a ballot campaign in 1997 earned him a place on the California Labor Federation’s “do not patronize” list.

Mosher confirmed by phone that Rosselli’s file at Sutter did in fact come up at Oliveto that evening. But he said Dewar “baited” him and Whitehurst into discussing it. Furthermore, he said, Whitehurst reported that Rosselli’s file was “clean.”

In fact, a March 12, 2008 e-mail from Dewar to Mosher suggests that the team focus on Rosselli’s “hypocrisy” and states, “Have we approached anyone at Sutter re: dirt on Sal? Have we been able to peek into their oppo file?”

Later that day Mosher replied, “John Whitehurst read Sutter’s whole oppo file on Sal in 1997.” In a follow-up message, Mosher writes that the file “really supports the idea that he’s not motivated by money.”

DeBruin did not return calls for comment. Kami Lloyd, communications coordinator for Sutter, disputed whether the oppo file even existed: “To my knowledge,” she told us, “no such file exists at Sutter Health.”

Reached for comment, Rosselli reacted angrily to news of the alleged “skunk team” and the fact that a research file on him, compiled by a corporation perceived to be anti-union, was being discussed among SEIU officials. “It’s shocking. It’s treasonous. For Andy Stern to be using our members’ dues money to finance [a smear] campaign against his own members in United Healthcare Workers, it’s fundamentally anti-union.”

Mosher defended his firm’s involvement with SEIU. He told us that he and Whitehurst were “not brought on board to do negative things against Sal Rosselli.” Instead, he said their mission has been to help tout the union’s accomplishments as it prepares to hold its convention from June 1-4 in Puerto Rico.

SEIU spokesman Andy McDonald echoed Mosher’s description of the firm’s duties. Both Mosher and McDonald brought up the fact that Whitehurst has also worked for Rosselli’s UHW union.

UHW’s Paul Kumar confirmed that Whitehurst is currently “on our payroll” to assist in a dispute against Sutter Health — the very company Whitehurst worked for in the 1990s and the same source that provided him with access to Rosselli’s research file. “These guys [BMWL] claim they are trying to reinvent themselves,” Kumar said. “But to be on our payroll and to engage directly in executing a dirty tricks program … is about the most blatant violation of professional ethics I can imagine.”

Whitehurst did not return calls for comment.

Dewar claimed he urged Mooney and the other attendees of the March 10 dinner to consider “appropriating” Rosselli’s democratic reforms. “The members would all wildly support it. And that way, if the International co-opted Rosselli’s ideas, then [the internal conflict] really would be about this clash of personalities, Rosselli versus Stern, instead of ideas.” According to Dewar, Mosher and Whitehurst were receptive to the proposal to co-opt Rosselli’s initiatives, but that “Josie nixed it.”

When we asked Mosher if he remembered this exchange from the meeting, he said his memory was “hazy” and that “a lot was being discussed that night.”

Although Dewar was, by his own account, an active participant in the skunk team, he says he started to have second thoughts. The dinner at Oliveto, Dewar said, and the discussion of Sutter’s file on Rosselli, “made me want to take a shower … the cynicism I was exposed to was toxic.”

One week later, he sent Mooney an e-mail informing her that, “Today’s my last day at SEIU … the circular firing squads that are now forming in the local and in SEIU nationally have left me jaded, stressed out, and depressed.”

SEIU’s McDonald denied that the skunk team exists, or ever existed. He added that “the meeting [at Oliveto] was about talking about how [Mosher] could help SEIU communicate our message … within the context of the misinformation campaign being spread by Sal Rosselli and UHW’s leaders.”

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE

The rancor between Rosselli and Stern has reached a boiling point in recent weeks. In compiling this story, we had to wade through reams of documents and endure long expatiations from officials and press flaks about the sins of the other side. Both factions have constructed slick, professional-looking Web sites to question the probity of their rivals, and both have coined kitschy names for their respective policy initiatives. The SEIU has countered Rosselli’s “Platform for Change” with what union leaders call a “Justice for All” platform.

But the internecine struggle may have driven Josie Mooney and other high-level SEIU staffers to do much more than vent about Rosselli or seek dirt on him from political consultants. E-mails obtained by the Guardian suggest that she and other SEIU officials worked to influence an important local delegate election last month — possibly in violation of union rules — and, some union members now allege, in violation of federal law.

Delegates selected in the election will attend the union’s international convention in June and will decide between the Rosselli’s “Change” and Stern’s “Justice” platforms. The outcome of that vote, and others like it, will shape the mammoth labor organization’s future for years to come. And the e-mails appear to show a concerted effort by Mooney and Stern loyalists to ensure that Rosselli’s dissidents don’t stack the convention and push through their set of reforms.

Referring to themselves in the e-mails as the “Salsa Team,” SEIU staffers discussed strategy and coordinated campaign activity for the delegate election with high-ranking union officials like Mooney and Damita Davis-Howard, the president of Local 1021, the e-mails show. In a formal complaint, some members charge that these activities violated Local 1021’s Election Rules and Procedures — specifically Rule 18, which states that “while in the performance of their duties, union staff shall remain uninvolved and neutral in relation to candidate endorsements and all election activities.”

While Rule 18 does not specifically spell out when union staff can advocate for candidates, other than proscribing such activities “while in performance of their duties,” the e-mails in our possession are date- and time-stamped, and at least one was sent during normal business hours. Furthermore, the Guardian has obtained an internal memo from Local 1021 official (and apparent Salsa Team member) Patti Tamura in which she warned union staffers that the phrase “‘performance of their duties’ goes beyond [Monday through Friday] and 9-5p.”

One Local 1021 official who asked not to be identified told us that Tamura’s memo appeared to be a clear message that staff should stay completely out of the election. “They made it perfectly clear to the lower staff that your employment doesn’t stop [after hours]; you’re still staff. That means you don’t get involved. But now it turns out they themselves were doing it. That’s a double standard … it’s certainly not right.”

The messages between Salsa Team members show them actively working to recruit potential delegates sympathetic to Stern’s platform and to aid Davis-Howard in her bid to represent the union at the June convention. One missive, dated Feb. 18, which appears to come from the personal e-mail account of Local 1021 employee Jano Oscherwitz and was sent to what appear to be the personal accounts of Tamura and Mooney, requests that a “message for Damita” be drafted.

A forwarded e-mail from that same day, from Oscherwitz to what appear to be personal e-mail accounts for Tamura, fellow 1021 staffer Gilda Valdez, and “Damita” includes a “Draft Message” with bulleted talking points, apparently for Davis-Howard to use as she “Collect[s] Signatures on Commitment Cards.”

“Commitment cards” refers to pledges from union members to support certain delegates.

The e-mails go beyond merely aiding Davis-Howard and other Stern-backed candidates. They also include detailed strategy for opposing Rosselli and countering his message. A March 5 Salsa Team message includes an attached document with several talking points critical of the dissident leader. In the body of the e-mail, SEIU staffer Gilda Valdez advises Davis-Howard, Mooney, 1021 Chief of Staff Marion Steeg, and others to “Memorize the points in talking to folks.” Valdez goes on to say in the e-mail that she “will be calling … about your assignments.”

Reached for comment, Davis-Howard confirmed that the AOL e-mail account listed as “Damita” was hers. But she claimed no knowledge of the Salsa Team or the messages sent to her. “If you’re saying those e-mails went to my home computer, who knows if I ever even got them?”

Davis-Howard bristled at the suggestion that the Salsa Team’s activities violated union rules. “Are you trying to tell me that I can never campaign? Does it [Rule 18] say that I have to be neutral and uninvolved 24 hours a day?”

Calls to Mooney, Oscherwitz, Valdez, and Tamura were not returned. Through an SEIU spokesman, Mooney declined to comment.

A BAD AFTERTASTE

On April 4, three days after the Guardian first reported on the Salsa Team e-mails on our Web site, Sanchez and several other 1021 officials filed a formal complaint with the union’s election committee. In the complaint, they accuse Davis-Howard and the other team members of violating Rules 10 and 18 of the union’s election codes. Rule 10 forbids “the use of union and employer funds … to support any candidate.”

Local 1021 executive board member and Stern appointee Ed Kinchley authored part of the complaint. According to the text, which was obtained by the Guardian, Kinchley wrote, “While telling other staff that they may be fired for any intervention in this election, Ms. Davis-Howard and the others involved secretly did exactly what they told other staff they were forbidden from doing.”

The complaint was signed by 16 Local 1021 officials, including numerous members of the local’s executive board. It called on the election committee to remove Davis-Howard “from the elected Delegate list” and to bar Salsa Team members from attending the convention in June.

The issue also has landed in federal court, where UHW was expected to file against Stern and other SEIU officials, alleging interference in delegate elections.

More cynical sources both inside and outside SEIU told us they believe the Rosselli-Stern feud boils down to one thing: power — either holding onto or expanding it. But labor scholar and former Local 790 member Paul Johnston had a more nuanced perspective.

Johnston, who taught at Yale and, until recently, worked for the Monterey Bay Labor Council, told us he admired both leaders and the work each has done on behalf of the larger union. Calling the current strife “a huge can of worms,” he added, “These are questions of principle and there are good ideas on both sides.”

Stern’s push to increase the union’s bargaining and political clout through more consolidation, Johnston went on, “has some very positive aspects to it…. In the old days, many of these kind of mergers were done for purely political power. The mergers being conducted today [at Stern's direction] are primarily strategic, though. But there are some power issues that inevitably arise.” On the other hand, he said, Rosselli’s UHW, “is a dynamic organizing union that has [its] own issues.”

J.B. Powell

http://www.sfbg.com

The secret deal worked out between SEIU bosses and nursing home owners denies union members the right to speak out, strike, or protect patients. SEIU president Andy Stern did not turn to sports cars, young girlfriends, adventure athletics, or otherwise immerse himself in narcissism after his 13-year-old daughter died from surgery complications, his wife later divorced him, and he took to dining alone in bars. Instead, Stern has said in his book and to newspaper and magazine writers, the 2002 personal tragedy caused him to become something of a combined Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King, a futuristic innovator applying his genius to empowering disenfranchised workers in his 1.8-million-member SEIU, where Stern became president in 1996.

The union left the umbrella of the AFL-CIO in 2005, based on the idea that the old trades federation was a stodgy, backward-looking organization not focused enough on growth. Key to Stern’s characterization of himself as a new, different type of labor leader is his assertion that the SEIU is leaving behind the old class-struggle-style unionism pitting employees against bosses. In its place is a modern template where workers and employers seek to advance interests they hold in common.

“Employees and employers need organizations that solve problems, not create them,” Stern wrote in A Country That Works. “Nursing home owners and SEIU leaders are formulating a new national labor-management committee and new state-based relationships to promote quality and employer economic stability. In California, the industry and union worked with the legislature on a plan to enhance quality in nursing homes, stabilize the work force, and provide more resources for direct patient care.”

However, there’s another trove of literature describing the recent history of Stern’s SEIU, one that’s quite different than the Cassie-focused genre popular in newsstands and on bookshelves. It’s contained in secret for-top-union-officials-eyes-only contracts, memos, lobbying agreements, and analysis reports obtained from various sources by SF Weekly. They illustrate the details of a sweetheart deal between the SEIU and California nursing home companies that impair, rather than empower, workers and patients, while inflating dues-paying union ranks.

These documents suggest Stern’s post-Cassie leadership of the SEIU shares little in common with Martin Luther King, and doesn’t involve much real innovation. Instead, it’s merely a re-hash of the sort of sweetheart company-union labor deals that have marred the reputation of trade unionism throughout history. It has involved trading away workers’ free-speech rights, selling out their ability to improve working conditions, and relinquishing their capability to improve pay and benefits, in order to expand the SEIU’s and Stern’s own power.

As testament to how little interest Stern’s SEIU has in explaining to the public, or to union workers, the inner workings of its modern, employer-friendly style of leadership, 10 requests for interviews to officials at Stern’s Washington headquarters, and to union officials in Northern and Southern California, went unanswered.

In spite of the official silence, union memos obtained by SF Weekly also point to a serious rift between Stern and Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, an Oakland-based 140,000-member local representing workers in California hospitals, nursing homes, and other health facilities. The fight is over whether the union should continue its current, Stern-backed strategy of expanding membership by giving up workers’ rights, and the rights of patients they serve, through “partnerships with corporate America” such as the nursing home pact mentioned in A Country That Works.

Or should the union seek to expand the old-fashioned way, through recruitment, political pressure, picketing and other protests, lawsuits, alliances with advocacy groups, and pointing out corporate abuses to the press? Officials with Sal Rosselli’s UHW-West have apparently taken a strong stand saying corporate-friendly alliances aren’t the panacea Stern makes them out to be.

And documents I’ve obtained suggest that regardless of the image crafted by his own brilliant public relations, Stern has tread a route common among men who’ve suffered crippling late-life personal setbacks. He’s become ornery in his old age. Sal Rosselli won’t answer questions when I call him on his cellphone. And judging from the wall of silence I’ve received from some other officials in his local, he’s apparently instructed the rest of his staff to do the same.

Notwithstanding, secret SEIU documents I’ve obtained have made me come to respect Rosselli’s style of union leadership. Leaked SEIU contracts, memos, and reports, as well as off-the-record interviews with some union insiders, suggest Rosselli has been engaged in a showdown with Stern over the rights of unionized health care workers, and of the patients they care for. According to a recent report prepared by UHW-West, Stern’s brand of corporate collaboration has done little for the SEIU besides inflating the membership rolls with workers who’ve received hardly any benefit from union membership.

At issue is a 2003 agreement between the SEIU and a group of California nursing home chains. According to this pact, its terms would be kept secret, and otherwise “be held in confidence to the full extent allowed by law.” Notwithstanding, I received two copies of the misleadingly named “Agreement to Advance the Future of Nursing Home Care in California,” from different sources last month. I have also obtained a copy of a similar agreement recently negotiated between the SEIU and nursing home chains in Washington state, which involves similar tradeoffs between the SEIU and nursing home chains.

The California agreement was set to expire at the end of last year; the union and the nursing homes are currently negotiating a possible extension. Whether, or how, the agreement will be extended may have been thrown in doubt thanks to complaints about the current agreement coming from Rosselli’s UHW-West.

On the SEIU’s side of the 2003 bargain, the union agreed to use its clout with Democratic legislators in Sacramento to accomplish three goals of interest to nursing home owners:
The SEIU pledged to use its lobbying muscle to pass a 2004 bill increasing MediCal subsidies to nursing homes by more than $2 billion over four years, according to patient advocates. The bill passed, creating a windfall for nursing home owners.

The union also agreed to attempt to pass tort reform legislation that would have limited patients’ right to sue in the event they were neglected, raped, abused, or killed. (The union’s tort reform lobbying efforts were put on hold, however, after a 2004 SF Weekly story led union members and advocacy groups to complain.)

The SEIU also pledged in the 2003 pact to staunch any efforts by patient advocates to push for legislation or regulations requiring nursing homes to provide enough staff to keep patients safe and healthy, unless the nursing home companies agree to such reforms in advance. The SEIU will “oppose any long-term-care-specific staffing and reimbursement legislation or regulation that fails to meet mutually agreed objectives,” the agreement states.

According to lobbyists for nursing home patients, the union has indeed been successful in repressing efforts by nursing home advocates to pass legislation that would have tied increases in state nursing home subsidies to improvements in the quality of care.

In return, the nursing home chain owners agreed to allow the SEIU to recruit workers into their union. Under ordinary circumstances, nursing home owners vigorously resist union organizing drives by occasionally intimidating and firing union-sympathetic workers, and by attempting to convince them that union membership isn’t in their interest. Under the lobbying agreement, however, the nursing home chains would refrain from these tactics in a certain number of facilities if the union helped to pass the 2004 funding bill, and in more facilities if the union got tort reform legislation passed.

So far, workers in some 42 nursing homes have joined the SEIU in this way, according to a union report. This membership gain has allowed the union to publicly characterize the lobbying deal as a means to improve the quality of care for nursing home patients, while improving wages, benefits, and working conditions for people who care for the aged and infirm.

This is the new era of worker-employer collaboration touted in Stern’s book, and in articles that characterize him as a bold modernizer. Journalists, however, appear to have been so caught up in Stern’s tactic of getting weepy about his deceased daughter during interviews that they’ve failed to find out exactly what it is he’s talking about.

If they had, they would have discovered a monumental catch: workers who joined the union specifically as part of the 2003 agreement with nursing home chains, an agreement that is supposed to be a national model for corporate collaboration, get a severely stripped-down version of union representation. In important ways, the agreement causes workers to lose rights rather than gain them.

Under the 2003 lobbying pact, all nursing home workers entering the union under the auspices of the agreement would work under uniform, employer-friendly labor contracts called “template agreements.”

These agreements specify that the union is not allowed to report health care violations to state regulators, to other public officials, or to journalists, except in cases where the employees are required by law to report egregious cases of neglect and abuse to the state. The agreements also prohibit the unionized workers from picketing, and negotiating improvements in health care or other benefits. They prohibit the workers from having a say in their job conditions. According to the template contract, employers have the “exclusive right to manage the business.”

This means the owners set pay rates, pay increases, and incentive plans. They hire, lay off, demote, discipline, and determine benefits for workers without union input. The employers may outsource work performed by union members, and speed up, reassign, or eliminate jobs at will. The employer may eliminate vacations, or any other time off, as the employer sees fit.

The agreement also guarantees that workers’ wages will not put an employer at an “economic disadvantage,” either through employee pay, benefits, or through staff-per-patient ratios.

To advocates for health care consumers, contract language guaranteeing the union will refrain from reporting poor nursing home conditions to state regulators is particularly appalling.

“This is a sector where caregivers are the eyes and the ears and the witnesses when there is abuse. To tie their hands and to tie their tongues is to let people die. That’s immoral and a terrible thing for a nursing home worker to have to live with,” says Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, and author of Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom. “I’ve never seen a labor union except for the SEIU enter into a top-down, industry-friendly agreement that binds the hands of the workers.”

The agreement doesn’t merely prohibit workers from attempting to complain about their lot once they’ve signed a union contract. It also puts a halt on any traditional unionizing drive in other nursing homes owned by a chain that is party to the lobbying agreement — even in cases where workers have expressed interest in joining the SEIU.

“There’s a struggle going on at the SEIU, and the struggle is, what kind of unionism is being advanced? Are these agreements that lay the ground for voluntary recognition? Or are they in fact straightjackets?” said Bill Fletcher, a visiting professor at City University of New York, who formerly held the SEIU position of assistant to the president for the East and South.

It’s from studying that internal SEIU struggle that I’ve discovered new respect for UHW-West under Rosselli’s leadership.

That union local recently issued a report analyzing the 2003 lobbying pact from the workers’ perspective.

The report, titled “The California Alliance Agreement: Lessons Learned in Moving Forward,” suggests that the agreement resulted in subsidies that fattened nursing home profits, and handcuffed workers, while inhibiting the union’s chances at ever negotiating legitimate labor contracts that truly enhanced workers’ lives.

“Alliance-based template agreements do not allow workers to empower themselves,” the UHW-West analysis report says. “Is it any wonder that we have often heard from these workers that ‘the boss brought us the union?’”

The report can be read as a repudiation of Stern’s brave new path, coming out of the biggest health care workers’ union local in the western U.S.

“Clearly this is an internal polemic against the direction coming out of Washington,” Fletcher notes.

Indeed, the UHW-West report comes near calling the 2003 agreement a sellout.

For one thing, the union might have been able to expand, while obtaining greater benefits for workers, without any agreement at all. “Many workers at Alliance nursing homes throughout California were precluded from organizing,” the UHW-West report says.

Those workers who were assimilated into the SEIU through the lobbying deal were introduced to a paltry version of trade unionism, the report says.

“If the nature of the labor agreement defined in the current Alliance templates — which restrict members’ rights and ability to be empowered — is allowed to continue, what effect will this have on the fundamental nature of a union organization? What ultimately happens if we give up the right to strike as the means for workers to level the playing field with employers when needed?” the report says. “We would argue that it would adversely affect our mission and goal to advance and defend the interests of our members, and in fact, may come close to becoming close to what have historically been called ‘company’ unions.”

According to the “Lessons Learned” report, the UHW surveyed 1,600 members who were under these Alliance template contracts. The workers’ No. 1 complaint: Short staffing at these nursing homes hampered their ability to provide quality care for patients.

Indeed, short staffing is cited in news stories, in lawsuit complaints, and by public health advocates as the primary cause behind cases of neglect where patients develop bedsores, are left covered in their own feces, or die needlessly of festering illnesses or injuries.

Ironically, the SEIU’s 2003 MediCal subsidy bill was touted as a way to help nursing homes afford to hire enough caregivers to adequately provide for patients.

Instead, the Lessons Learned report claims, the nursing home chains used an inordinate amount of the increased state subsidies to fatten profits, rather than increase staffing levels.

According to the UHW-West analysis, nursing homes organized under the agreement received $119 million in added MediCal subsidies during the ‘06-07 funding year thanks to the 2005 nursing home funding bill the SEIU led the effort to pass. But those same employers will only spend $21 million of that money on personnel in those facilities.

“Did we sell ourselves short?” the UHW-West study asks, leaving the answer implicit: absolutely.

In what some view as payback for UHW-West’s role in speaking up for the rights of nursing home workers and patients, the union’s Washington headquarters has moved to strip the local of its ability to represent nursing home workers.

During a 2006 statewide reorganization of SEIU locals, in which California union locals merged along industry lines, Stern’s representatives recommended that all the state’s nursing home workers be reassigned to a new bargaining unit run out of Los Angeles by a Stern ally named Tyrone Freeman.

Freeman is reportedly more amenable than Rosselli to the “collaborate-with-corporate-America” style of worker organizing alluded to in A Country That Works. Freeman did not return calls requesting comment.

“I would be likely to offer up my Southern California buildings first, because the Southern California union reps are simply more pleasant, more cooperative, and more pragmatic,” said Greg Stapley, spokesman for California’s fifth-largest nursing home chain, the Ensign Group.

Though Ensign is not currently part of the agreement with the SEIU, Stapley has been sitting in on negotiation meetings with a thought to joining.

Indeed, according to a Jan. 13 memo to UHW-West board members from the local’s director for nursing home organizing, Freeman’s local “literally said that the union should have no say on things like what shifts the workers should work.”

This attitude has earned the favor of nursing home owners, the memo said.

“The operators indicated very strongly that they do not want SEIU to ‘run’ their facilities and that their position on any new agreement meant that the current ‘template’ contract would remain intact.”

Rosselli’s UHW, meanwhile, has said in negotiations that “the template must go, that workers as health care providers need a voice and rights on the job,” the memo said.

Rosselli has so far struggled to resist efforts by the national union to dilute his power. A recent Stern memo, however, suggests the possibility exists that nursing home workers currently represented by UHW-West could eventually be moved to the Long Term Care Workers’ local run by Freeman.

Stern’s “corporate collaboration” rhetoric aside, the facts of the California Alliance agreement demonstrate that workers and employers don’t have the same interests.

“You can get a condominium of interests that includes the union, but excludes the union member. He doesn’t get self-determination, doesn’t get the full market value that strong collective bargaining would give him. He doesn’t get the right to be a citizen, and be able to complain about a situation where they aren’t treating clients properly,” says Robert Fitch, author of Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise.

Somehow, though, Stern has managed to get journalists to look past possible downsides of his new labor paradigm by offering up a compelling story line, where a labor leader is impelled by the death of his daughter to become courageous, and to make a real stamp on the world.

Though American newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television stations don’t employ labor reporters anymore, they’ve got plenty of business writers. And if those journalists know anything, it’s that there’s truth in numbers. The union’s membership numbers are up every year — “1.8 million members and growing” is www.seiu.org’s homepage tagline.

Making Stern’s ideas even more attractive, the man is constantly doing things that are just plain newsy. In February he appeared with the head of Wal-Mart giving lip service to the idea of universal health care. Before that, he was meeting with leaders of China’s government-controlled national labor union — the one with the reputation for worker suppression. And in 2004 he was quoted saying that his union might be better off if George Bush beat John Kerry. And then there’s the intriguing underlying story line: the anti-intuitive idea that workers and the boss are actually on the same team. For story-hungry hacks, what’s not to like about all that?

Stern “does things that are very provocative. Unless you dig into it, you say, hey, the guy is full of good ideas,” says Fletcher, the former SEIU organizer who teaches at CUNY. “The fact is, workers and employers are going to clash. And they have contradictory interests. Andy obscures that question, and that helps explain the attraction he has for Fortune, for Business Week. “

Buoyed by a cushion of flattering press, the SEIU and nursing home owners are now in talks to extend the cynically named “Agreement to Advance the Future of Nursing Home Care in California.”

If the pact is extended as a result of current negotiations, the SEIU would lobby for a new piece of California legislation adding hundreds of millions of dollars of enhanced state Medical subsidies to nursing home companies. In return, the SEIU would be allowed to gain members in additional nursing homes, according to a version of the agreement currently under discussion.

However, a Bay Area union local that’s party to those negotiations has pointed out that the reality behind SEIU’s policy of joining hands with corporate America is far worse than the hype.

I urge UHW-West leader Sal Rosselli, along with any other SEIU members with a conscience, to work toward the next logical step. It’s time to scuttle this pact before it causes the waste of more tax dollars, diminishes the rights of more workers, and helps endanger the lives of more elderly and disabled nursing home patients.

Somehow, I believe Cassie might have wanted it that way.

Matt Smith
Published: April 11, 2007

http://www.sfweekly.com