Saturday, August 29, 2015

SEIU Watch

Perhaps SEIU should pay more careful attention to whom they send to organize more highly educated workforces.
 
SEIU is supposedly “helping” Professors at Webster and Washington University, who have been trying to organize for quite some time. The problem, according to one adjunct professor, is:
 
“SEIU practices the lowest forms of union behavior….They do not understand the relative independence of thought and self-direction that most adjuncts at Wash. U. (and Webster) bring to their jobs at a university. They certainly do not understand, or care to understand or appreciate, the mostly collaborative and collegial environment that we want and work to create and maintain…It is in the nature and function of the SEIU to create discord between adjuncts and unrepresented faculty and staff, and even between adjuncts who wish to join the SEIU as members and those who do not.”
 
Furthermore, their communication with these employees has been far from professional – “disdainful” in fact. E-mails are apparently so full of typos, poor word choice, and misspellings, that is is hard for any educated person, much less collegiate professors, to take them seriously. And apparently, the SEIU organizers in charge of this campaign assumed Webster and Wash U. to be catholic institutions – they are not!
 
This is the organization that claims they can do a better job of communicating your issues with your working environment to your managers. They can’t. It’s the reason 880 government workers in Fresno County, California decertified SEIU this month.
 
Those in leadership positions with the Service Employees organization are more interested in power and wealth than in helping those who payroll them. This is made perfectly clear by looking at how they spend their members dues money. Here’s one clue – it’s not on representation.
 
Last month, SEIU spent $2 million on a signature-gathering initiative to get a cigarette tax hike initiative on the California 2016 ballot. They then spent $500,000 on an ad thanking New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for getting a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers. Here’s one interesting factoid: none of those people that will benefit from the $15 fast food minimum wage are SEIU members. Check out this article if you're interested in deeper insight into SEIU’s relationship with the state of New York.
 
We’ve known that SEIU uses its members money to gain political clout. It’s nice to see though that sometimes it doesn’t pay off. Over the past year, SEIU spent $35 million of its members money on a special deal with the California Hospital Association. Among other things, SEIU promised to utilize their political position to get $6 billion a year in new Medicaid revenues for California hospital corporations. In exchange, CHA was going to let SEIU organize their employees without a fight. Well, the deal seems to have blown up in SEIU’s face. An internal recording revealed Duane Dauner, CHA’s CEO, reporting that SEIU is struggling to pull through on their half of the deal.
 
So what it looks like is SEIU spent $35 million dollars and likely won’t gain one new member from it.
 
Last but not least, SEIU is getting sued by the Freedom Foundation. The suit states that based on the Supreme Court decision last year, SEIU should repay all the dues money that was taken from the home health care workers who did not want to be a part of the union.
 
Source: Labor Relations INK August 2015
 
Comments
In 1971, I joined Washington University Medical School to establish the Personnel function.  I expected union activity.  I received a Notice from the NLRB that the Service Employees Union had petitioned to represent their 120 Maintenance employees.  SEU sent Guido and Vinny from Chicago.  I led the campaign against the union and I won 80% to 20%. It’s good to see the faculty is still full of “free enterprisers”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

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