California’s Union Showdown
Wall Street Journal
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Next month in California, nearly 45,000 Kaiser Permanente health-care workers will choose their union. America hasn't seen a private-sector labor election this big since the United Auto Workers organized Ford in 1941. By the time ballots are cast, tens of millions will have been spent on a six-week campaign as brutal as any political race this year. At stake? No less than the future of America’s most powerful labor group, the Services Employees International Union.
What’s also unusual about this election is that it doesn’t pit union against employer, but union against union. Kaiser’s workers were organized years ago by the SEIU. The drama started last year when Sal Rosselli, who ran the SEIU’s huge California health-care local from Oakland, left to found a rival outfit called the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). His union has but 6,000 members; the SEIU claims 2 million. Mr. Rosselli has spent the last 18 months trying to steal away as many of the 150,000 members from his old SEIU local as possible through a series of union elections. “It's a real David and Goliath story,” he says.
Kaiser—the SEIU’s crown jewel in health care—is a possible game changer. Employees who hold some of the best-paying unionized jobs around will have the choice to switch from the SEIU to Mr. Rosselli’s group. Californians make up a third of the union’s members, so losing Kaiser would be a grave blow.
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