more SEIU
[yeah, I know, it bears the taint of Labor Notes, those weenies]
http://labornotes.org/node/989
Service Employees End California Nursing Home Partnership Mark Brenner
Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial
partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May
31. The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrangement
that brought over 3,000 workers into SEIU after the union secured
higher state government payments to nursing homes that care for
Medicaid patients. In addition to giving SEIU organizing access to a
number of nursing homes, the agreement provided “template” contract
language for these newly organized workplaces.
SEIU announced it was ending the partnership just days after the
executive board of United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), one of the
two SEIU locals that were party to the original deal, launched a
campaign to steer the agreement in a different direction.
In recent weeks, leaders of UHW, which represents health care workers
throughout California, started a petition campaign to force SEIU’s
international board to give members a voice in re-negotiating the
nursing home partnership. As part of that campaign, UHW leaders sent
a letter to members painting a grim picture of where things were headed:
“Some in the national SEIU are negotiating an agreement with nursing
home employers—in California and nationally—and have repeatedly
excluded UHW nursing home members and elected representatives from
the process. These agreements could restrict our nursing home
members’ voice on the job and be implemented without affected members
even having the right to vote.”
UHW leaders proposed three principles that should govern any future
employer agreement in the health care industry: union democracy, the
right to aggressively advocate for the people they serve, and full
union membership for workers organized through partnership agreements.
Using the petition campaign and intense behind-the-scenes pressure,
UHW leaders demanded that these principles “be embodied by clearly
defined contract standards” in all future agreements.
WHAT IS AT STAKE?
Each of the three principles responds to problems with the nursing
home partnership identified by health care workers and patient
advocates since its inception.
For example, the agreement prohibited the union from reporting
problems with organized nursing homes to state regulators or the
media, except in cases mandated by law. Short staffing was one such
issue, and a top concern for new members organized under the
agreement, according to internal UHW survey data. But under the terms
of the partnership, the union was barred from waging an aggressive
public campaign to address staff-to-patient ratios.
Similarly, most workers who joined SEIU through the partnership
agreement ended up with “template” contracts that were negotiated
before they joined the union. These deals, according to an internal
analysis by UHW, “allowed for very little power on the shop floor
with no right to strike and no clear path towards full collective
bargaining rights.”
The overall effect was to create a growing pool of second-class union
members, with the pre-negotiated deals “discouraging—and in some
cases preventing—workers from independently engaging in struggle to
improve their working conditions.”
Finally, the California nursing home agreement reflected a new
approach to organizing members and negotiating contracts in the
nursing home industry, one aimed at spreading these agreements
nationwide. Under this new model the international union,
particularly a small group of national officers and staff, played a
decisive role in negotiating with nursing home operators. Current
nursing home workers, and their elected union leaders, were kept at
arm’s length during recent talks, leading to a justifiable concern
about who was looking out for their interests in negotiations.
According to SEIU members in Northern California, interest in this
partnership agreement has been high. More than 20,000 people had
signed the UHW petition within weeks of its release.
“We’ve signed up over half the members where I work,” said one UHW
shop steward who asked to remain anonymous. “What really got people
upset was this idea that guys in suits, sitting in Washington, D.C.,
will bargain our contracts.
“These are people who have never worked in a hospital and who don’t
know anything about our jobs. Then, to top it off, we won’t even have
a right to vote on the contract they negotiate.”
FAST-TRACK PARTNERSHIPS
Although the California nursing home agreement has been shelved, it
sparked a national debate inside SEIU, raising important questions
about what kind of labor-management partnerships are possible or
advisable as the union continues its relentless drive to expand its
membership.
Jerome Brown, former president of SEIU’s massive 1199 New England
health care local, has openly questioned whether the union can forge
effective employer partnerships from scratch in non-union workplaces.
In a review of SEIU International President Andy Stern’s 2006 book, A
Country that Works, Brown noted that real gains, including organizing
rights, were usually “the payoff for years of struggles, strikes, and
other conflicts with employers.”
Only after a period of open conflict, Brown argued, can “strong
unions and engaged members enter into mature, cooperative
relationships” with their employers. By contrast, the arrangements
SEIU has used to organize the nursing home industry left Brown with
some lingering concerns:
“We have to ask ourselves if these methods can produce a real,
democratic workers’ organization or if it is more likely that they
will produce a ‘membership’ that is as alienated from the union
leadership as it is from the employer. A ‘membership’ that sees
itself, correctly, as a third party in a relationship with union
brokers and employers—the very antithesis of true rank-and-file
unionism.”
This perspective, that it’s “the bosses bringing in the union” rather
than the members, was common among nursing home workers organized
under the California agreement, according to internal UHW documents.
For UHW leaders, this raised the question of, “What kind of worker
organizations are…template agreements creating?”
After years of experience, some of these leaders have concluded that
these arrangements “may come close to becoming what have historically
been called ‘company’ unions.”