Thousands of Kaiser employees start union vote
Dan Verel | North Bay Business Journal
September 13, 2010
Kaiser Permanente employees throughout Northern California begin voting today in a costly, high-stakes election that will likely determine the influence of two quarreling unions, each seeking to represent nearly 44,000 workers.
In one of the largest union votes to take place in decades, Kaiser employees will choose to either remain with the powerful Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, or join its rival offshoot, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, with both influence and an estimated $40 million in annual dues collected at stake.
From today through Oct. 4, a mail-in vote will be conducted that could significantly alter California’s health care landscape. A vote count will begin Oct. 6. Employees could also vote for no union at all.
The two unions – in a unique battle that pits labor against labor rather than labor against employer – have clashed mightily on everything from when a vote could take place to legalities involving the existing contract that SEIU negotiated with Kaiser.
Now, as voting begins, the contentious battle has reached new heights, with NUHW proponents saying their rival puts organizational power over individual workers while SEIU advocates claim NUHW and its supporters ultimately undermine organized labor and jeopardize workers’ collective bargaining power and the existing contract.
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We lost but I feel good. We fought the good fight. I am a Lift Tech here at Kaiser Sunset and I think I personally turned about 200 co-workers, I punked out the toughest thugs SEIU and Kaiser management sent out to get me, and it took a room full of organizers whose combined yearly salaries was around one million dollars to EQUAL what little ol’ me did for free. And in my department, Transportation/Lift Team, we voted 29 to 9 for the NUHW. My biggest disappointment was the manifestation of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels truism here at Kaiser, courtesy of the propagandists at SEIU, “The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it”. And to that I would like to add, that, not only will more people will believe it, but folks of all types and intelligences. One will not doubt the intelligence and wherewithall of those in Respiratory Therapy or Xray dept., yet they showed an appalling lack of critical thinking in voting en masse, like lemmings, for SEIU. A Phyrric victory for SEIU!!