by Steve Early
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) wants its members to believe that their union is just like the alluring but ultimately nightmarish hostelry immortalized by The Eagles. It’s a place of permanent imprisonment only “programmed to receive” workers and their dues money, not let either go elsewhere when the rhetoric of “progressive unionism” wears thin and the rank-and-file becomes restive. According to proprietor Andy Stern, once you’ve checked into SEIU, you can never leave.
Tens of thousands of Stern’s disgruntled “guests,” who work in west coast health care facilities, are about to disprove this claim. Their bags are packed and they’re headed out the door of Stern’s “Hotel California,” as soon as federal (or local) labor law permits. After a bruising internal battle-in which an estimated ten million dollars of their own money was used by Stern to undermine and attack them-rank-and-filers in Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers (UHW) have formed a new union of their own. Launched on January 28, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) is seeking to retain bargaining rights long held by UHW, until Stern placed it under trusteeship the day before.
Workers made a collective decision to flee SEIU after the long-threatened take-over of its third-largest affiliate. As previously reported in CounterPunch, Stern began brandishing this club last March. When UHW had the audacity to question SEIU’s management-friendly approach to health care organizing, bargaining, and politics, the SEIU president launched a multi-faceted counter-insurgency campaign. Now, several hundred out-of-state SEIU staffers have been dispatched to California as a full-time occupation force. At huge expense to the union treasury, their mission is to replace 100 elected UHW leaders, purge UHW’s own 500-member staff, seize the local’s offices and assets, and inform employers that they should no longer deal with UHW representatives about any labor-management issues. According to Stern, this highly disruptive intervention in a well-functioning local is necessary “to restore democratic procedures” and “protect the members’ interest.” After “UHW has been stabilized”–which could take 18 months to three years, based on past SEIU practice-”elections for new officers will be held.”
Not surprisingly, UHW hospital, nursing home, and home care workers aren’t waiting around that long. As Kaiser Permanente receptionist Eleanor Mendoza explained to The Los Angeles Times last Tuesday, “We knew [trusteeship] was coming, and now we have to get real and decertify.” According to Mendoza, “You can’t have people from the other side of the United States running the union.”
Over the past two years, UHW members made a valiant effort to change the way SEIU is run, using tactics borrowed from Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and other reform groups. Their fight took a new turn Jan. 25 when key UHW activists gathered at five California locations to consider Stern’s final pre-invasion surrender demand. A day before these emergency meetings, UHW leaders had received the following ultimatum from Washington: within five days, either agree to move all 65,000 UHW “long term care” members into a new Stern-created entity with appointed leaders (and little accountability) or face trusteeship. Elsewhere in labor, such a transfer would be highly unusual if the workers affected hadn’t okayed it beforehand. But, for SEIU members, Stern’s directive was just “business as usual.” In recent years, no group of dues-payers in America has been treated more like pieces of furniture by top union officials. Under Stern’s regime, you can be moved here, there, or anywhere as part of top-down restructuring that always purports to create “new strength” for workers.
At their extraordinary mass meetings on January 25, five thousand UHW shop stewards showed what really creates union power-collective action by an energized rank-and-file. They voted nearly unanimously to reject Stern’s coercive demands. All three UHW constituencies-hospital workers, nursing home employees, and home health care aides-vowed to remain united in UHW, which has negotiated good contracts by relying on rank-and-file participation and workplace mobilization. (Their preferred organizational unity between “acute care” and “long-term care” members is, in fact, the usual configuration of SEIU health care locals around the country.)
On January 26, UHW’s popular president Sal Rosselli made a last bid for reconciliation. He called a press conference and offered a counter-proposal: UHW’s 65,000 at-risk members should be granted the right to vote on the transfer sought by Stern. Before this balloting was held, however, the workers needed guarantees that Stern’s new statewide “long term care” local would be democratically structured and responsive to its projected 240,000 members. The predecessor for this yet-to-be-formed “mega-local”–SEIU Local 6434 in Los Angeles–provided lousy representation under Stern-imposed leaders like Tyrone Freeman. Last September, Freeman was ousted for embezzling $1 million and then replaced by another Stern appointee. With both 6434 and UHW under trusteeship now–and three other recently consolidated locals also operating under Stern-appointed “interim presidents”–about 80 percent of the union’s 600,000 members in California have no elected leaders.
Rosselli ended his last press briefing as an elected SEIU official with a carefully worded statement declaring that UHW members would resist trusteeship by all means, up to and including SEIU decertification. Using that particular “D” word always sends a shiver through any union bureaucracy lacking political legitimacy and a real workplace base. Despite the trend in SEIU and other American unions toward less (rather than more) internal democracy, replacing an incumbent union-no matter how bad–is often viewed as a strategic dead-end or a dangerous exercise in “disunity.” Yet, forming a rival union (or joining a competing labor federation) is widely accepted elsewhere in the world as a fundamental expression of workers’ “freedom of association.” As I learned while working with CWA members in Quebec in the late-1980s, the dynamic of competition actually makes incumbent unions much more responsive to workers, even in smaller bargaining units. (At that time, Quebecois unionists could choose between several different labor federations and petition for an election to switch bargaining representatives far more easily than in the U.S., due to labor law differences here and our national AFL-CIO’s “no-raiding” rules.)
UHW’s defection will nevertheless upset labor-oriented academics, liberal magazine editors, and Huffington Post bloggers. Some of these folks, like American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson, remain so enthralled with Stern that they’ll excuse any organizational mis-conduct by SEIU; in a February 1 commentary [Eds. note: Meyerson’s article in the Los Angeles Times discusses the conflict within UniteHere as well as that between UHW and SEIU.] , Meyerson praises Stern’s ability “to establish a rapport with non-union liberals and intellectuals” (like himself) and dismisses Rosselli’s challenge as an opportunistic attempt to “play the democracy card.” For Stern boosters, the pink champagne will always will be on ice– as long they keep praising their benefactor or, at the very least, don’t sign any “open letters” in The New York Times criticizing SEIU trusteeships. But if trade unionists and intellectuals, who favor the Employee Free Choice Act to aid union organizing, really believe in “employee free choice,” how can they argue that dissatisfied dues-payers shouldn’t use the option of joining a new labor organization? Particularly if their existing one won’t even let them choose their own local union or its leaders?
The path UHW activists have chosen now is not easy, due to the huge amount of resources that SEIU always devotes to keeping unhappy members in captivity, for as long as possible. Nine years ago, SEIU lost a quarter of its total membership in Ontario after workers there revolted against Stern’s attempted consolidation of eight local unions into one. As a former Canadian staffer recalls, some of the locals involved “were already facing member backlash at the lack of responsiveness and democratic participation” within SEIU. Stern’s province-wide merger plan “met solid objection from both members and local executive boards alike across Ontario.” Just before a general membership vote to abandon SEIU, “the International obtained a court injunction rendering the vote non-binding and placed all Ontario locals under trusteeship.” As this Canadian activist reports, “the vote to leave went ahead anyway, with near unanimous support….Immediately, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) raided SEIU’s Ontario bargaining units, eventually winning decert votes in 180 units, representing 14,000 members.”
In 2002-3, Rhode Island janitors, campus maintenance workers, and librarians represented by SEIU Local 134 were similarly told they had to merge with a Boston-based building service workers local that Stern had recently put under trusteeship. When the vast majority signed a petition to keep their own local, their wishes were ignored and members started to form an independent union, the United Service and Allied Workers-RI. Former Brown librarian and 134 business agent Karen McAninch felt compelled to support that initiative. So, she says, “the local was trusteed and I was suspended, along with all the elected officers and stewards.” Yet, by 2007, almost all of 134’s original bargaining units had voted to switch from SEIU to USAW-RI, when their contracts expired or pre-contract expiration “open periods” enabled workers to file labor board petitions to decertify Stern’s union. In the meantime, USAW-RI managed to organize 150 new members at the Providence Library, while fending off a costly, harassing lawsuit filed by SEIU against McAninch and former 134 officer Charlie Wood, who were both accused of breaching their “fiduciary duty” to the International union. (USAW’s legal defense was aided by fundraising appeals in both Labor Notes and Union Democracy Review).
Post-trusteeship litigation also got messy when 2,000 Bay Area janitors tried to bail out of SEIU in the summer of 2004. In response to yet another Stern take-over, they formed United Service Workers for Democracy (USWD) to oust their old bargaining representative, SEIU Local 87, and win the right to negotiate with San Francisco cleaning service contractors. SEIU flooded downtown office buildings with out-of-town organizers-just like the crew of Stern loyalists now occupying UHW–but the janitors still won their decert vote by a 2 to 1 margin. Undeterred, SEIU seized Local 87’s property, sued USWD’s lawyer, and tried to thwart management recognition of the new union-a strategy sure to be pursued again when NUHW challenges SEIU’s claim to represent 85,000 workers at Kaiser and other major hospital chains.
In several other places, including SEIU nurses’ Local 1991 in Miami, the collection and brandishing of “decert cards” has been used by local leaders as a key bargaining chip, to forestall further Stern trusteeship threats or forced merger attempts for an agree-upon period of time (a deal similar to the written agreement that facilitated USWD’s eventual return to the SEIU fold, much to the chagrin of some janitors). In 2005, the threat of an impending decertification campaign even enabled 2,300 workers at the University of Massachusetts to leave SEIU peacefully for the greener pastures of the state teachers association (but only after a protracted struggle against the unpopular and inept Stern-appointed leader of public employee Local 888).
Can NUHW do what USAW-RI, SEIU’s Canadian dissidents, and other groups have already done, albeit on a smaller scale? There are people with years of experience in health care organizing who think that NUHW will fare better than most defectors. One is Jerry Brown, the now retired, longtime president of SEIU’s 20,000-member health care affiliate in Connecticut and Rhode Island. A former member of Stern’s international executive board, Brown praises Rosselli for standing up “for the rights of members to determine their own future and run their own union, to fight for better standards and engage in militant action if they chose to.”
According to Brown, “Stern and other SEIU leaders have now centralized all important national bargaining and organizing in D.C. and effectively neutered the power of the members to bargain with their bosses. The result will be and has been already a series of sweetheart contracts that take away or severely limit the right to strike and other traditional union rights like seniority and workplace grievances.”
To Brown and other longtime SEIU-builders (most of whom are not free to speak out as he is doing now), the UHW takeover is a painful, “horrible development for SEIU and the entire labor movement.” Once Stern’s colleague and discreet in-house critic, Brown now says publicly that: “Stern et al are a disgrace and we should mobilize to help the new union and the thousands of courageous UHW members who have stood up to SEIU.”
Supporters of “employee free choice,” inside and outside of SEIU, are already responding to Brown’s appeal by sending checks made out to “Fund for Union Democracy” to: The Fund For Union Democracy, 465 California Street, Ste. 1600, San Francisco, California 94104
For more information on that effort, contact donations@fundforuniondemocracy.org.
For the latest news on the California health care workers’ union that’s now being created within the Stern-controlled shell of the old, see the website of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (also known as “the New UHW”).
Steve Early has aided union organizing, bargaining, and strike activity since the mid-1970s. His forthcoming Monthly Review Press collection, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on The Class War At Home, includes his reporting for CounterPunch on UHW’s “Purple Uprising In Oakland.” Copies can be ordered at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/embeddedwithorganizedlabor.php. Early can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com
Source: 
I divided my time between the Universidad de Los Andes and clinical practicums through Barrio Adentro. At the University, I studied in the department of Community and Preventive Medicine earning a public health certification at one of the oldest and most traditional universities in South America. This provided a substantive and structured counterpart to my community-based clinical work in Barrio Adentro. Although my formal studies inspired me, my everyday interactions within the rural Andean community where I lived and worked effectively contextualized the impact of the new clinics and health policies of the Chavez government. 
After the health census in the spring, we next organized a summertime ‘graduation’ for all of the community infants and their mothers who had successfully completed at least six months of exclusive lactation. It was a very Venezuelan event, with graduation gown, diplomas, and presents for mom and baby. Our public health messages (family spacing, reproductive health, and the benefits of lactation) were featured throughout the day. The celebration provided a successful excuse to 
canvass our neighborhood for pregnant women who otherwise would not have initiated early prenatal care. Also, we created a safe place to discuss reproductive health care without preaching or further marginalizing young, poor families. 
roger hollander 
Ebola Didn’t Have to Kill Thomas Eric Duncan, Nephew Says; Statement by RN’s at Texas Health Presbyterian October 18, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Africa, Health, Racism.Tags: Africa, dallas ebola, ebola, ebola infection, ebola protocol, ebola symptoms, josephus weeks, national nurses, nina pham, nurses, presbyterian hospital, racism, roger hollander, texas nurses, thomas eric duncan
add a comment
Roger’s note: Is it ebola that we need to worry about or is it our racism and capitalist health care system?
Josephus Weeks; National Nurses United
October 15, 2014
The Dallas Morning News
On Friday, Sept. 25, 2014, my uncle Thomas Eric Duncan went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. He had a high fever and stomach pains. He told the nurse he had recently been in Liberia. But he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay for treatment, so within hours he was released with some antibiotics and Tylenol.
Two days later, he returned to the hospital in an ambulance. Two days after that, he was finally diagnosed with Ebola. Eight days later, he died alone in a hospital room.
Now, Dallas suffers. Our country is concerned. Greatly. About the lack of answers and transparency coming from a hospital whose ignorance, incompetence and indecency has yet to be explained. I write this on behalf of my family because we want to set the record straight about what happened and ensure that Thomas Eric did not die in vain. So, here’s the truth about my uncle and his battle with Ebola.
Thomas Eric Duncan was cautious. Among the most offensive errors in the media during my uncle’s illness are the accusations that he knew he was exposed to Ebola – that is just not true. Eric lived in a careful manner, as he understood the dangers of living in Liberia amid this outbreak. He limited guests in his home, he did not share drinking cups or eating utensils.
And while the stories of my uncle helping a pregnant woman with Ebola are courageous, Thomas Eric personally told me that never happened. Like hundreds of thousands of West Africans, carefully avoiding Ebola was part of my uncle’s daily life.
And I can tell you with 100 percent certainty: Thomas Eric would have never knowingly exposed anyone to this illness.
Thomas Eric Duncan was a victim of a broken system. The biggest unanswered question about my uncle’s death is why the hospital would send home a patient with a 103-degree fever and stomach pains who had recently been in Liberia – and he told them he had just returned from Liberia explicitly due to the Ebola threat.
Some speculate that this was a failure of the internal communications systems. Others have speculated that antibiotics and Tylenol are the standard protocol for a patient without insurance.
The hospital is not talking. Until then, we are all left to wonder. What we do know is that their error affects all of society. Their bad judgment or misjudgment sent my uncle back into the community for days with a highly contagious case of Ebola. And now, officials suspect that a breach of protocol by the hospital is responsible for a new Ebola case, and that all health care workers who care for my uncle could potentially be exposed.
Their error set the wheels in motion for my uncle’s death and additional Ebola cases, and their ignorance, incompetence or indecency has created a national security threat for our country.
Thomas Eric Duncan could have been saved. Finally, what is most difficult for us – Thomas Eric’s mother, children and those closest to him – to accept is the fact that our loved one could have been saved. From his botched release from the emergency room to his delayed testing and delayed treatment and the denial of experimental drugs that have been available to every other case of Ebola treated in the U.S., the hospital invited death every step of the way.
When my uncle was first admitted, the hospital told us that an Ebola test would take three to seven days. Miraculously, the deputy who was feared to have Ebola just last week was tested and had results within 24 hours.
The fact is, nine days passed between my uncle’s first ER visit and the day the hospital asked our consent to give him an experimental drug – but despite the hospital’s request they were never able to access these drugs for my uncle. (Editor’s note: Hospital officials have said they started giving Duncan the drug Brincidofovir on October 4.) He died alone. His only medication was a saline drip.
For our family, the most humiliating part of this ordeal was the treatment we received from the hospital. For the 10 days he was in the hospital, they not only refused to help us communicate with Thomas Eric, but they also acted as an impediment. The day Thomas Eric died, we learned about it from the news media, not his doctors.
Our nation will never mourn the loss of my uncle, who was in this country for the first time to visit his son, as my family has. But our nation and our family can agree that what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas must never happen to another family.
In time, we may learn why my uncle’s initial visit to the hospital was met with such incompetence and insensitivity. Until that day comes, our family will fight for transparency, accountability and answers, for my uncle and for the safety of the country we love.
[Josephus Weeks, a U.S. Army and Iraq War veteran who lives in North Carolina, wrote this piece exclusively for The Dallas Morning News. Reach him at josephusweeks@yahoo.com. ]
Photo credit: National Nurses United
Statement by RN’s at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as provided to National Nurses United
October 15, 2014
National Nurses United
This is an inside story from some registered nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas who have familiarity with what occurred at the hospital following the positive Ebola infection of first the late Thomas Eric Duncan and then a registered nurse who cared for him Nina Pham.
The RNs contacted National Nurses United out of frustration with a lack of training and preparation. They are choosing to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.
The RNs who have spoken to us from Texas Health Presbyterian are listening in on this call and this is their report based on their experiences and what other nurses are sharing with them. When we have finished with our statement, we will have time for several questions. The nurses will have the opportunity to respond to your questions via email that they will send to us, that we will read to you.
We are not identifying the nurses for their protection, but they work at Texas Health Presbyterian and have knowledge of what occurred at the hospital.
They feel a duty to speak out about the concerns that they say are shared by many in the hospital who are concerned about the protocols that were followed and what they view were confusion and frequently changing policies and protocols that are of concern to them, and to our organization as well.
When Thomas Eric Duncan first came into the hospital, he arrived with an elevated temperature, but was sent home.
On his return visit to the hospital, he was brought in by ambulance under the suspicion from him and family members that he may have Ebola.
Mr. Duncan was left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present.
No one knew what the protocols were or were able to verify what kind of personal protective equipment should be worn and there was no training.
Subsequently a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit- yet faced resistance from other hospital authorities.
Lab specimens from Mr. Duncan were sent through the hospital tube system without being specially sealed and hand delivered. The result is that the entire tube system by which all lab specimens are sent was potentially contaminated.
There was no advance preparedness on what to do with the patient, there was no protocol, there was no system. The nurses were asked to call the Infectious Disease Department. The Infectious Disease Department did not have clear policies to provide either.
Initial nurses who interacted with Mr. Duncan nurses wore a non-impermeable gown front and back, three pairs of gloves, with no taping around wrists, surgical masks, with the option of N-95s, and face shields. Some supervisors said that even the N-95 masks were not necessary.
The suits they were given still exposed their necks, the part closest to their face and mouth. They had suits with booties and hoods, three pairs of gloves, no tape.
For their necks, nurses had to use medical tape, that is not impermeable and has permeable seams, to wrap around their necks in order to protect themselves, and had to put on the tape and take it off on their own.
Nurses had to interact with Mr. Duncan with whatever protective equipment was available, at a time when he had copious amounts of diarrhea and vomiting which produces a lot of contagious fluids.
Hospital officials allowed nurses who had interacted with Mr. Duncan to then continue normal patient care duties, taking care of other patients, even though they had not had the proper personal protective equipment while caring for Mr. Duncan.
Patients who may have been exposed were one day kept in strict isolation units. On the next day were ordered to be transferred out of strict isolation into areas where there were other patients, even those with low-grade fevers who could potentially be contagious.
Were protocols breached? The nurses say there were no protocols.
Some hospital personnel were coming in and out of those isolation areas in the Emergency Department without having worn the proper protective equipment.
CDC officials who are in the hospital and Infectious Disease personnel have not kept hallways clean; they were going back and forth between the Isolation Pod and back into the hallways that were not properly cleaned, even after CDC, infectious control personnel, and doctors who exited into those hallways after being in the isolation pods.
Advance preparation
Advance preparation that had been done by the hospital primarily consisted of emailing us about one optional lecture/seminar on Ebola. There was no mandate for nurses to attend trainings, or what nurses had to do in the event of the arrival of a patient with Ebola-like symptoms.
This is a very large hospital. To be effective, any classes would have to offered repeatedly, covering all times when nurses work; instead this was treated like the hundreds of other seminars that are routinely offered to staff.
There was no advance hands-on training on the use of personal protective equipment for Ebola. No training on what symptoms to look for. No training on what questions to ask.
Even when some trainings did occur, after Mr. Duncan had tested positive for Ebola, they were limited, and they did not include having every nurse in the training practicing the proper way to don and doff, put on and take off, the appropriate personal protective equipment to assure that they would not be infected or spread an infection to anyone else.
Guidelines have now been changed, but it is not clear what version Nina Pham had available.
The hospital later said that their guidelines had changed and that the nurses needed to adhere to them. What has caused confusion is that the guidelines were constantly changing. It was later asked which guidelines should we follow? The message to the nurses was it’s up to you.
It is not up to the nurses to be setting the policy, nurses say, in the face of such a virulent disease. They needed to be trained optimally and correctly in how to deal with Ebola and the proper PPE doffing, as well as how to dispose of the waste.
In summary, the nurses state there have been no policies in cleaning or bleaching the premises without housekeeping services. There was no one to pick up hazardous waste as it piled to the ceiling. They did not have access to proper supplies and observed the Infectious Disease Department and CDC themselves violate basic principles of infection control, including cross contaminating between patients. In the end, the nurses strongly feel unsupported, unprepared, lied to, and deserted to handle the situation on their own.
We want our facility to be recognized as a leader in responding to this crisis. We also want to recognize the other nurses as heroes who put their lives on the line for their patients every day when they walk in the door.
National Nurses United Urges You to Take Action Now!
Sign the Petition and Tell President Obama – Protect Our Nurses!