Judge rules against SEIU in California fight
Alec MacGillis
The Washington Post
7/21/2011
A judge ruled this week that the Service Employees International Union improperly coerced workers caught in the middle of SEIU’s high-stakes turf battle with a breakaway union in California, potentially invalidating a 2010 election involving 43,500 employees.
SEIU, the nation’s most politically influential union, has been engaged in a costly fight with the former leaders of a 150,000-worker California chapter that formed a breakaway union in 2009. The split followed clashes with then-SEIU President Andy Stern over his emphasis on growing membership even if it meant giving concessions to employers.
Last fall, SEIU won the biggest standoff, an election to represent 43,500 Kaiser Permanente workers in Northern California.
The vote was a big setback for the breakaway union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, leaving it with fewer than 10,000 members. But this week, Administrative Law Judge Lana Parke ruled that Kaiser had improperly withheld pay raises from workers in Southern California who had switched to the new union and that SEIU had then improperly threatened the workers voting in the Northern California election that they, too, could have raises denied if they made the switch…
The article continues at The Washington Post.
Also, at iOwnTheWorld, Busting Her Hyatt
The Obama administration is very supportive of labor union workers and very unfriendly to companies who even try to open plants in right-to-work states…so why would it be that President Obama turns a blind eye to a billionaire hotel chain owner who is mistreating her union workers in several American cities? She even turned heat lamps on them in the 100-degree hot summer weather this week as they were striking in Chicago?
Oh wait. We are talking about Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel chain….bajillionaire bundler to Barack Obama.
Read the rest at iOwnTheWorld.
