The California branch of the infamous SEIU has spent $6 million in the first four months of 2018 in an alleged effort to push California’s kidney dialysis companies’ employees into the union.
What do unions do when they do not want workers to have the right to vote in secret-ballot elections? Very often, they target entire companies (or industries) with expensive PR campaigns–called “corporate campaigns“–in an effort to get the companies (or industry) to capitulate to voluntarily recognizing the unionization.
Insofar as unions using this tactic, none are more adept at it than the Service Employees International Union—the union that has spent nearly $100 million targeting the fast food industry with its “Fight for $15” campaign and whose former president proudly boasted once that his union gave America the health care law now known as Obamacare.
In California, the SEIU is deploying its “corporate campaign” model once again.
In the first four months of this year, the SEIU has spent $6 million of its members’ dues on a ballot initiative targeting the kidney dialysis industry.
It’s reason? To push California’s kidney dialysis companies’ employees into the SEIU, according to an SEIU-critic.
According to the SEIU-critical Stern Burger With Fries, in the first 111 days of 2018, Dave Regan, the president of SEIU’s United Healthcare West (SEIU-UHW), has “spent $6 million on just one of his more than 10 ballot initiatives.”
Soon, he may be spending lots more.
His initiative — which targets kidney dialysis companies in an effort to push them into a unionization deal with SEIU-UHW — qualified this week for California’s November ballot.
If Regan can convince the dialysis companies to cut a special deal with him, he could withdraw his ballot initiative before a June 28 deadline. If not, the initiative is headed to an expensive statewide election campaign against deep-pocketed opponents.
According to California’s Secretary of State’s page, the SEIU-UHW’s non-profit group Californians for Kidney Dialysis Patient Protection and Californians Care raised and spent $6 million from January through April this year.
On the other side of the SEIU-UHW’s ballot initiative is coalition of more than 50 organizations, which includes a broad cross section of business, community and health organizations opposed to the SEIU-UHW’s ballot initiative.
According to the coalition’s website, the SEIU-UHW’s ballot initiative “jeopardizes access to care for vulnerable patient population.”
United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) union, with a long history of pushing controversial ballot initiatives to leverage its political agenda, is behind a deeply-flawed dialysis proposition aimed for the November 2018 statewide ballot. The proposition limits what private health insurance companies pay for dialysis treatment in California. In doing so, this measure would dangerously reduce access to care for Californians with kidney failure who need dialysis treatments three days a week, three to four hours at a time, to survive.
Given the SEIU’s history, however, spending $6 million on an initiative that could, potentially, reap the union millions more in union dues is a fair exchange.
