Class Action lawsuit filed against Kaiser over mental health care wait times
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
Times-Herald
10/25/2013
A lawsuit served at Kaiser Permanente's Oakland headquarters Thursday alleges that Kaiser Foundation Health Plan facilities, including Vallejo's, routinely deny its members timely access to mental health services.
Kaiser officials call the suit a ploy in ongoing contract negotiations.
The Oakland-based law firm of Siegel LeWitter Malkani that works closely with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) -- which represents Kaiser's mental health professionals and optical workers -- filed the suit earlier this month on behalf of "three named plaintiffs and thousands of other Kaiser members who have been harmed" by this alleged practice, attorney Jonathan Siegel said Thursday.
The union represents some 70 members at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center. The firm has sued Kaiser before, Siegel said.
Kaiser officials called the suit the "NUHW's latest attempt to use inaccurate claims about our mental health care services to apply pressure in their protracted labor negotiations with Kaiser Permanente."
The union's actions do "nothing to further the negotiations that should be taking place at the table," they said.
The lawsuit alleges that Kaiser routinely violates state law by refusing to provide critical mental health services to its members within the time frame set by law.
"As a result, Kaiser members have been denied urgent services, forced to wait for long periods of time to receive needed services, discouraged from seeking services altogether, or compelled to incur out-of-pocket expenses for treatment outside of the Kaiser system," according to the suit.
The lead plaintiff, Point Richmond resident Susan Futterman, said her husband, Fred Paroutaud, killed himself after "desperate" requests for an urgent mental health appointment were delayed until his psychiatrist returned from vacation.
Los Angeles area plaintiff Megan Mortensen wound up seeking an urgent mental health appointment outside the system after Kaiser allegedly "refused" her request for a timely appointment after the loss of her brother. The third plaintiff, Acianita Lucero of Oakland, allegedly "made repeated requests for Kaiser to provide her with an urgent mental health appointment but Kaiser refused to see her within the 48 hours required by law," according to the suit.
The suit follows a report from earlier this year by the California Department of Managed Health Care which suggested Kaiser needed to reduce mental health appointment wait times. Kaiser was fined $ 4 million -- the second largest fine issued by the Department -- and issued a Cease and Desist Order to correct the problems, Siegel said.
Kaiser officials say the report did not fault Kaiser's mental health care quality or member's ability to obtain urgent or emergency mental health care.
"What was identified in the DMHC survey were some areas where our non-urgent appointment wait times and data tracking needed improvement," officials said. "We took the findings seriously, have submitted a corrective action plan to the DMHC, and have worked to correct the issues identified in the survey."
The class action lawsuit seeks compensatory and statutory damages for class members as well as an injunction requiring Kaiser to comply with the law, Siegel said.
"We're suing for Kaiser to clean up there act and provide mental health services to their clients that complies with the law," he said. "And we want damage compensation for the tens of thousands of Kaiser members who have been victimized by this."
Showing posts with label NUHW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NUHW. Show all posts
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Is Kaiser Permanente in cahoots with the Department of Managed Care? NUHW Files Complaint Over Hiring of DMHC Attorney
DMHC Director (and former Kaiser counsel) Brent Barnhart
I've known for a long time that the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC or DOMHC) was in cahoots with Kaiser. DMHC responded to a complaint I filed by saying that Kaiser fulfilled its duty by taking X-rays, and was not obligated to look at them!
DOMC's actions shouldn't come a surprise, since Brent Barnhart,the Director of DMHC, is a former senior counsel at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.
Having one of his attorneys move to Kaiser will make everything work smoothly. Marcy Gallagher will have access to Director Barnhart, and knowledge of the inner workings of DMHC. Although I can hardly imagine that things could actually get easier for Kaiser. After all, DMHC has to disapprove of SOMETHING every once in a while, just to pretend it's regulatory agency, right?
NUHW Files Complaint Against Kaiser Over Hiring of DMHC Attorney
California Healthline
September 19, 2013
The National Union of Healthcare Workers has filed a complaint against Kaiser Permanente alleging that the company hired an attorney who previously worked at a state regulatory agency to impede an investigation into its practices, Payers & Providers reports.
NUHW filed the complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (Shinkman, Payers & Providers, 9/19).
The move comes only a few weeks after NUHW filed a lawsuit to keep Kaiser from participating in California's health insurance exchange. Exchange officials have selected Kaiser to offer individual and small business policies (California Healthline, 9/6).
The union -- which represents about 5,000 Kaiser workers -- has been pressuring the organization since it lost an election earlier this year to represent about 45,000 employees, according to Payers & Providers.
However, John Borsos -- a spokesperson for NUHW -- said the complaint filed this week is unrelated.
The complaint highlights Kaiser's hiring of Marcy Gallagher, a former attorney with the California Department of Managed Health Care's enforcement division.
Kaiser hired Gallagher in 2012 while she was investigating the organization's health plan for issues related to mental health services access. She now serves as a practice leader in Kaiser's regulatory response business unit.
In a statement, NUHW said that Gallagher "reportedly trained Kaiser officials on how to answer questions posed by DMHC's investigators."
The union argues that the move violates the state's Political Reform Act, which regulates "switching sides by state officials" and "influencing prospective employment."
Gallagher, DMHC and Kaiser declined to comment on the complaint (Payers & Providers, 9/19).
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Kaiser demands cuts in nursing staff and wages--despite $5.7 BILLION profit since 2009 (and so does Sutter Health San Francisco with $200,000,000 profit in 2012)
What's more important than consumer health? A 20% profit rate by a "non-profit".
Who helped punish nurses for forming a new union? Lawyer Emma Leheny, who is now head counsel of CTA, California Teachers Association (see below).
"The state’s huge hospital chains and health corporations are demanding concessions on very front: staffing levels, health and welfare, pensions, even wages, and this at a time when these corporations (all ‘non-profits’) have rarely been more profitable."
--Cal Winslow
An Alliance in Healthcare
By Cal Winslow
Zcommunications.org
January 05, 2013
Cal Winslow's ZSpace Page
In a giant step forward for California healthcare workers, two of the nation’s most militant unions have joined forces in the battle against Kaiser Permanente, the giant California based healthcare corporation. It is a battle of enormous proportion, one with implications for the entire industry, almost certainly beyond.
The alliance joins the California Nurses Association (CNA) with the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW); it was formally announced January 3, at CNA headquarters in Oakland, CA. It comes in the face of a set of interrelated challenges, each crucial, first of all of healthcare workers of course, but equally important for patients, for workers nationwide, for us all.
“This is an affiliation whose time has come,” NUHW president Sal Rosselli told the assembly of healthcare workers, union staff and members of the press. “Employer attacks are on the rise, nowhere more so than at Kaiser Permanente. NUHW members at Kaiser, with RN co-workers from CNA have already engaged in repeated statewide strikes to stand their ground against threatened reductions to wages, benefits and job protections that other unions at Kaiser have already agreed to in spite of four years of record profits for Kaiser.”
Other unions? Here, already, the plot thickens, for this alliance is not just to battle Kaiser; it is also to fight Kaiser’s incumbent union, the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) California affiliate, United Healthcare Worker West (UHW). Zenei Cortez, RN, who chairs CNA’s Kaiser bargaining team, also CNA co-president, explained, “Uniting together, CNA and NUHW are taking a huge step forward in achieving our joint goal of upholding standards for workers and patients.” She made it quite clear, however, that the fight was also with SEIU’s UHW. “We will have to fight Dave Regan /UHW’s imported, thug extraordinaire president/ as well. We will fight Reagan and his cronies, it is disheartening to say that he has undermined our fight, but we will fight him every step of the way.”
It will be an uphill fight. California healthcare workers face an employer’s assault unprecedented in recent history. The state’s huge hospital chains and health corporations are demanding concessions on very front: staffing levels, health and welfare, pensions, even wages, and this at a time when these corporations (all ‘non-profits’) have rarely been more profitable. Kaiser, the country’s largest healthcare corporation, has made $5.7 billion since 2009; it pays its CEO George Halvorson $8 million a year (along with a dozen pensions). Kaiser has twenty top executives who receive annually more than $1 million each.
Sutter Health, another huge Northern California hospital chain, last year alone made 200 million dollars at its San Francisco complex, an astounding feat – as Bay Area labor writer Carl Finamore points out, it presents a profit rate of 20%, far above industry averages. In the past year Sutter RNs have repeatedly struck, defying demand’s for concessions, most recently December 24. Sutter, like Kaiser, sits on huge reserves...
California’s Health Care Wars
Counterpunch
by CAL WINSLOW
June 19, 2012
California’s healthcare workers’ wars continue, in the streets, in collective bargaining and in the courts, at a level of conflict not often matched in the US today. More, in these California conflicts, healthcare workers and their unions are as often as not on the offensive.
The new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has struck the huge healthcare chain Kaiser Permanente four times now in the past year, twice with support from California Nurses Association (CNA-NNU) RNs. These two walk-outs (in September 2011 and January 2012), involving 20,000 strikers plus each, rank as the largest but one (the Verizon strike) on the table of recent strikes. At the same time, this spring, the NUHW has won first contracts – with wage increases and no concessions – at hospitals including Keck Medical Center, University of Southern California; Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco; Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital; the Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital; and Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo.
At Kaiser, NUHW members are refusing to accept demands in deliberately stalled negotiations for concessions by a (non-profit?) corporation that “profited” $2.1 billion last year and pays its CEO George Halvorson $9 million annually (eight pension plans thrown in). And they are doing this while the rival Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has caved in to Kaiser yet again, this time signing a backroom deal that includes concessions demanded by Kaiser in particular in healthcare benefits. The union has agreed to a “Wellness Program” that commits members to (among other things) “holding down the costs of care at KP” and “enhancing the effectiveness and productivity of the organization” –an agreement that sets a very dangerous precedent for unions in California and a primary reason the Kaiser nurses have already been out – in solidarity strikes, supporting NUHW – twice. All this comes as NUHW members prepare for the upcoming rerun of the big Kaiser election (43,000 service and technical workers) of 2010 – the results of that election, won by SEIU in collusion with Kaiser, having been thrown out by an NLRB judge, based on evidence of widespread misconduct by SEIU.
At the same time, NUHW’s fight with SEIU has gone through another round in the courts. On Wednesday, June 13, in a San Francisco courtroom packed with NUHW members and supporters, NUHW lawyers presented oral arguments in the appeal of sixteen former United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) elected officers and leaders and the NUHW. They appealed damages awarded in the 2010 civil suit brought by the SEIU.
The 2010 San Francisco civil case was a sordid episode, another low in SEIU’s most recent low road adventures. SEIU, to the surprise of few, had trusteed its militant, progressive, 150,000 member California local, UHW.
SEIU seized the assets of UHW, fired its officers, removed its elected executive board and purged its stewards. Not content with trusteeship, SEIU was determined, in the words of its then vice president, “Wall Street” Dave Regan, now UHW president, “to drive a stake through the heart” of the new union, and, more, to see that the former, elected, UHW leaders and staff would “never again work in the labor movement.”
SEIU’s goal, then, was not just to wreck UHW (which it now has done), but to punish its leaders and staff. In the extraordinary trial in Federal Court, 28 NUHW leaders were sued for “damages” – SEIU, in a civil lawsuit, demanded of the defendants $25 million. It was astonishing, an assault on a group of working class organizers, all the more vicious given lifestyles of SEIU’s top leaders (Regan: salary $300,000 plus), not to mention their millionaire lawyers. It charged that these people, all union men and women, had “conspired” (for “personal power and profit”) – for years and all on “company” time – to leave SEIU and found a new union. It claimed they were responsible for an array of alleged offences including alleged illegal actions. They were charged with “theft, violence, and sabotage;” they “left contacts open,” “neglected grievances,” were guilty of “fiduciary malfeasance.”
But all these were dropped, and the pursuit of damages was reduced to $4 million. The case essentially came down to the charge that the UHW leaders were working – for two or three weeks in January, 2009 – against SEIU while still on the payroll. The judge, William Alsup, clearly agreed and the he instructed the jury to fix awards accordingly.
The jury – which included not a single union member – found against sixteen of the defendants, all former UHW leaders and held them liable for $725,000. NUHW was also found liable for $725,000, though this too was extraordinary; NUHW had no “fiduciary duty” to SEIU and did not exist in the weeks at issue.
$1.5 million, nevertheless, was awarded, a far cry from the $25 million first demanded, but cruel punishment for sixteen working men and women.
The appeal was argued before a three judge panel of the US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Oakland attorney Dan Siegel contested the awards in the 2010 trial. Siegel challenged the basis for these findings, focusing on the alleged “fiduciary malfeasance.” –the charge that the UHW leaders had defied “fiduciary obligations” to SEIU leadership. In addition, he argued that the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury. In the 2010 trial, Alsup had repeatedly hectored the jurors, explaining at one point that this case – this conflict between a national union and its members in a local – was analogous to a dispute between the Bank of America and a branch office. A sort of corporate affair, an internal conflict within a corporation. He prohibited any discussion of any of the issues in the dispute within SEIU. No one on the jury was a union member.
Siegel insisted that the then elected officers and leaders of UHW had the right to contest the trusteeship, including the right to oppose the SEIU national leadership’s forced transfer of 65,000 long-term care workers from UHW to another local California, the key issue at the time, the one that ultimately was decisive in SEIU’s case for the trusteeship. The then UHW leadership had insisted that these workers had the right to decide the local of their choice – including the right to vote on the transfer.
Siegel argued that these officers’ responsibilities, then, were not simply to the SEIU‘s national leadership, led at the time by Andy Stern, but also to the members of UHW (including the 65,000), the people who had elected them, who determined the local union’s policies and paid the bills. Indeed they had an obligation to abide by the member’s decisions.
He contended that this fact invalidated the award of damages – these officers and leaders, even as SEIU members, had every right to explain to the local union’s members what rights they had in the weeks between to decision to transfer the 65,000 and, three weeks later, the imposition of the trusteeship when they were all summarily fired.
They were exercising protected speech, free speech, Siegel argued, when they organized meetings to inform UHW members of these rights and choices – including their right to dissent, to decertify, even the right to form a new union. SEIU lawyers had responded that the UHW leaders had no such rights and the case was essentially reduced to charge that the UHW leaders were working against SEIU while still on the payroll.
Siegel also argued that there were larger issues, issues just as important in the long run. What were the responsibilities of local union officers, not just to national leaders but to their members, again, the workers who elected them, set policy, etc., in particular when these members were in disagreement with national policies?
SEIU lawyer, Leon Dayan, repeated that there was a long-term conspiracy, something the jury had not found in 2010, and argued that the duties of the UHW officers and staff to the national and the local were one and the same – hence asserting that the elected local union officers and leaders were essentially no more than an administrative arm of the national union.
Speaking after the hearing, Siegel said the outcome was important for two reasons, first “to remove these entirely unfair judgments, still hanging over the heads of the sixteen defendants.” In this he said he was optimistic.
Second, on the larger issues, he said he was worried that the case raised issues that could prove “very dangerous for union activists. It took a law – Landrum Griffin Act, 1959 – in part designed to protect rank-and-file workers, and turned it on its head, using it as a vehicle for payback against dissenting local union officers and members.”
Back to the streets. At the same time these workers were in court – fighting for the right to have a union, one of their own choosing – nurses at Sutter Health were on strike at ten northern California hospitals. Their walkout, the fourth strike at Sutter since September, came as union officials and Sutter management continued to clash over sick leave, retirement benefits, health care payments, patient care conditions and other issues.
“Nurses at Sutter facilities are facing an unprecedented attack on their practice the scope of which we have not seen in over 20 years,” said Zenei Cortez, co-president of CNA/NNU. “Nurses everywhere are unifying to resist Sutter’s policies of unprecedented cuts in vital patient services for our communities and deterioration of patient care standards in our hospitals.”
The strike affected 4,400 RNs , as well as hundreds of respiratory, X-ray and other technicians at three Alta Bates Summit Medical Center facilities in Berkeley and Oakland, Mills-Peninsula Health Services hospitals in Burlingame and San Mateo, Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, San Leandro Hospital, Sutter Delta in Antioch, Sutter Solano in Vallejo, Novato Community Hospital.
“We don’t believe that Sutter needs to be demanding these onerous and unwarranted cuts from nurses because they are an extremely profitable operation that operates as what I call J.P. Morgan West,” said a California Nurses Association spokesperson. Sutter Health has made over $4.2 billion in profits since 2005, according to CNA. “They’re making decisions on what provides the best return for their shareholders, not for patient care,” he said.
Following the San Francisco hearing, a delegation of NUHW members, clad in red tee-shirts, headed for a noon rally across the Bay at Alta-Bates Summit. June, of course, has not been a good month for labor in the US, particularly in Wisconsin where the electoral turn into a (predictable) catastrophe. It’s far from all over, however. The fight-back continues, including here, in California’s booming healthcare industry.
Cal Winslow is the author of Labor’s Civil War in California, PM Press, 2012 (second edition, revised and expanded), an editor of Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below during the Long Seventies (Verso, 2010), and an editor of West of Eden, Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press, 2012). He is a Fellow at UC Berkeley, Director of the Mendocino Institute and associated with the Bay Area collective, Retort. He can be reached at cwinslow@berkeley.edu
TEACHERS versus NURSES???? See who was on the SEIU team!
Head Counsel Emma Leheny, the real decision-maker for California Teachers Association?
CTA head counsel Emma Leheny represented the union that caved in to Kaiser, SEIU, allowing cuts for nurses, and affirming the power of union officials over their members. Leheny is exactly the type of lawyer that CTA's corrupt officials like to have.
SEIU v. NUHW
Click to see entire decision affirming lower court judgment
FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 09-15855
D.C. No. 3:09-cv-00404-WHA
SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL
UNION; DAVID REGAN; ELISEO
MEDINA, as Trustees for SEIU
United Healthcare Workers West
and fiduciaries of the SEIU United
Healthcare WorkersWest and
Joint Employer Education Fund;
SEIU UNITED HEALTHCARE
WORKERSWEST, an unincorporated
association and fiduciary of the
SEIU United Healthcare Workers
West and Joint Employer
Education Fund; REBECCA COLLINS,
as a participant in the SEIU
United Healthcare WorkersWest
and Joint Employer Education
Fund,
Plaintiffs-Appellees,
OPINION v.
NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
WORKERS; JOHN BORSOS; AARON
BRICKMAN; GAIL BUHLER; WILL
CLAYTON; JOAN EMSLIE; GLENN
GOLDSTEIN; MARK KIPFER; GABRIEL
KRISTAL; PAUL KUMAR; BARBARA
LEWIS; FREJA NELSON; FRED
SEAVEY; IAN SELDEN; SAL ROSSELLI;
JOHN VELLARDITA; PHYLLIS
WILLETT,
Defendants-Appellants.
______________________________
SEIU v. NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of California
William H. Alsup, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted
January 14, 2010--San Francisco, California
Filed March 15, 2010
Before: Myron H. Bright,* Michael Daly Hawkins, and
Milan D. Smith, Jr., Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge Bright
*The Honorable Myron H. Bright, Senior United States Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit, sitting by designation.
______________________________
SEIU v. NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
COUNSEL
Jeffrey B. Demain (argued), Stephen P. Berzon, Peter D.
Nussbaum, Jonathan Weissglass, San Francisco, California,
Robert M. Weinberg, Leon Dayan, Washington, DC, Glenn
Rothner, and Emma Leheny, Pasadena, California, for the
plaintiffs-appellees.
Daniel Siegel (argued), Jose Luis Fuentes, and Dean Royer,
Oakland, California, for the defendants-appellants.
Who helped punish nurses for forming a new union? Lawyer Emma Leheny, who is now head counsel of CTA, California Teachers Association (see below)."The state’s huge hospital chains and health corporations are demanding concessions on very front: staffing levels, health and welfare, pensions, even wages, and this at a time when these corporations (all ‘non-profits’) have rarely been more profitable."
--Cal Winslow
An Alliance in Healthcare
By Cal Winslow
Zcommunications.org
January 05, 2013
Cal Winslow's ZSpace Page
In a giant step forward for California healthcare workers, two of the nation’s most militant unions have joined forces in the battle against Kaiser Permanente, the giant California based healthcare corporation. It is a battle of enormous proportion, one with implications for the entire industry, almost certainly beyond.
The alliance joins the California Nurses Association (CNA) with the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW); it was formally announced January 3, at CNA headquarters in Oakland, CA. It comes in the face of a set of interrelated challenges, each crucial, first of all of healthcare workers of course, but equally important for patients, for workers nationwide, for us all.
“This is an affiliation whose time has come,” NUHW president Sal Rosselli told the assembly of healthcare workers, union staff and members of the press. “Employer attacks are on the rise, nowhere more so than at Kaiser Permanente. NUHW members at Kaiser, with RN co-workers from CNA have already engaged in repeated statewide strikes to stand their ground against threatened reductions to wages, benefits and job protections that other unions at Kaiser have already agreed to in spite of four years of record profits for Kaiser.”
Other unions? Here, already, the plot thickens, for this alliance is not just to battle Kaiser; it is also to fight Kaiser’s incumbent union, the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) California affiliate, United Healthcare Worker West (UHW). Zenei Cortez, RN, who chairs CNA’s Kaiser bargaining team, also CNA co-president, explained, “Uniting together, CNA and NUHW are taking a huge step forward in achieving our joint goal of upholding standards for workers and patients.” She made it quite clear, however, that the fight was also with SEIU’s UHW. “We will have to fight Dave Regan /UHW’s imported, thug extraordinaire president/ as well. We will fight Reagan and his cronies, it is disheartening to say that he has undermined our fight, but we will fight him every step of the way.”
It will be an uphill fight. California healthcare workers face an employer’s assault unprecedented in recent history. The state’s huge hospital chains and health corporations are demanding concessions on very front: staffing levels, health and welfare, pensions, even wages, and this at a time when these corporations (all ‘non-profits’) have rarely been more profitable. Kaiser, the country’s largest healthcare corporation, has made $5.7 billion since 2009; it pays its CEO George Halvorson $8 million a year (along with a dozen pensions). Kaiser has twenty top executives who receive annually more than $1 million each.
Sutter Health, another huge Northern California hospital chain, last year alone made 200 million dollars at its San Francisco complex, an astounding feat – as Bay Area labor writer Carl Finamore points out, it presents a profit rate of 20%, far above industry averages. In the past year Sutter RNs have repeatedly struck, defying demand’s for concessions, most recently December 24. Sutter, like Kaiser, sits on huge reserves...
California’s Health Care Wars
Counterpunch
by CAL WINSLOW
June 19, 2012
California’s healthcare workers’ wars continue, in the streets, in collective bargaining and in the courts, at a level of conflict not often matched in the US today. More, in these California conflicts, healthcare workers and their unions are as often as not on the offensive.
The new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has struck the huge healthcare chain Kaiser Permanente four times now in the past year, twice with support from California Nurses Association (CNA-NNU) RNs. These two walk-outs (in September 2011 and January 2012), involving 20,000 strikers plus each, rank as the largest but one (the Verizon strike) on the table of recent strikes. At the same time, this spring, the NUHW has won first contracts – with wage increases and no concessions – at hospitals including Keck Medical Center, University of Southern California; Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco; Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital; the Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital; and Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo.
At Kaiser, NUHW members are refusing to accept demands in deliberately stalled negotiations for concessions by a (non-profit?) corporation that “profited” $2.1 billion last year and pays its CEO George Halvorson $9 million annually (eight pension plans thrown in). And they are doing this while the rival Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has caved in to Kaiser yet again, this time signing a backroom deal that includes concessions demanded by Kaiser in particular in healthcare benefits. The union has agreed to a “Wellness Program” that commits members to (among other things) “holding down the costs of care at KP” and “enhancing the effectiveness and productivity of the organization” –an agreement that sets a very dangerous precedent for unions in California and a primary reason the Kaiser nurses have already been out – in solidarity strikes, supporting NUHW – twice. All this comes as NUHW members prepare for the upcoming rerun of the big Kaiser election (43,000 service and technical workers) of 2010 – the results of that election, won by SEIU in collusion with Kaiser, having been thrown out by an NLRB judge, based on evidence of widespread misconduct by SEIU.
At the same time, NUHW’s fight with SEIU has gone through another round in the courts. On Wednesday, June 13, in a San Francisco courtroom packed with NUHW members and supporters, NUHW lawyers presented oral arguments in the appeal of sixteen former United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) elected officers and leaders and the NUHW. They appealed damages awarded in the 2010 civil suit brought by the SEIU.
The 2010 San Francisco civil case was a sordid episode, another low in SEIU’s most recent low road adventures. SEIU, to the surprise of few, had trusteed its militant, progressive, 150,000 member California local, UHW.
SEIU seized the assets of UHW, fired its officers, removed its elected executive board and purged its stewards. Not content with trusteeship, SEIU was determined, in the words of its then vice president, “Wall Street” Dave Regan, now UHW president, “to drive a stake through the heart” of the new union, and, more, to see that the former, elected, UHW leaders and staff would “never again work in the labor movement.”
SEIU’s goal, then, was not just to wreck UHW (which it now has done), but to punish its leaders and staff. In the extraordinary trial in Federal Court, 28 NUHW leaders were sued for “damages” – SEIU, in a civil lawsuit, demanded of the defendants $25 million. It was astonishing, an assault on a group of working class organizers, all the more vicious given lifestyles of SEIU’s top leaders (Regan: salary $300,000 plus), not to mention their millionaire lawyers. It charged that these people, all union men and women, had “conspired” (for “personal power and profit”) – for years and all on “company” time – to leave SEIU and found a new union. It claimed they were responsible for an array of alleged offences including alleged illegal actions. They were charged with “theft, violence, and sabotage;” they “left contacts open,” “neglected grievances,” were guilty of “fiduciary malfeasance.”
But all these were dropped, and the pursuit of damages was reduced to $4 million. The case essentially came down to the charge that the UHW leaders were working – for two or three weeks in January, 2009 – against SEIU while still on the payroll. The judge, William Alsup, clearly agreed and the he instructed the jury to fix awards accordingly.
The jury – which included not a single union member – found against sixteen of the defendants, all former UHW leaders and held them liable for $725,000. NUHW was also found liable for $725,000, though this too was extraordinary; NUHW had no “fiduciary duty” to SEIU and did not exist in the weeks at issue.
$1.5 million, nevertheless, was awarded, a far cry from the $25 million first demanded, but cruel punishment for sixteen working men and women.
The appeal was argued before a three judge panel of the US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Oakland attorney Dan Siegel contested the awards in the 2010 trial. Siegel challenged the basis for these findings, focusing on the alleged “fiduciary malfeasance.” –the charge that the UHW leaders had defied “fiduciary obligations” to SEIU leadership. In addition, he argued that the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury. In the 2010 trial, Alsup had repeatedly hectored the jurors, explaining at one point that this case – this conflict between a national union and its members in a local – was analogous to a dispute between the Bank of America and a branch office. A sort of corporate affair, an internal conflict within a corporation. He prohibited any discussion of any of the issues in the dispute within SEIU. No one on the jury was a union member.
Siegel insisted that the then elected officers and leaders of UHW had the right to contest the trusteeship, including the right to oppose the SEIU national leadership’s forced transfer of 65,000 long-term care workers from UHW to another local California, the key issue at the time, the one that ultimately was decisive in SEIU’s case for the trusteeship. The then UHW leadership had insisted that these workers had the right to decide the local of their choice – including the right to vote on the transfer.
Siegel argued that these officers’ responsibilities, then, were not simply to the SEIU‘s national leadership, led at the time by Andy Stern, but also to the members of UHW (including the 65,000), the people who had elected them, who determined the local union’s policies and paid the bills. Indeed they had an obligation to abide by the member’s decisions.
He contended that this fact invalidated the award of damages – these officers and leaders, even as SEIU members, had every right to explain to the local union’s members what rights they had in the weeks between to decision to transfer the 65,000 and, three weeks later, the imposition of the trusteeship when they were all summarily fired.
They were exercising protected speech, free speech, Siegel argued, when they organized meetings to inform UHW members of these rights and choices – including their right to dissent, to decertify, even the right to form a new union. SEIU lawyers had responded that the UHW leaders had no such rights and the case was essentially reduced to charge that the UHW leaders were working against SEIU while still on the payroll.
Siegel also argued that there were larger issues, issues just as important in the long run. What were the responsibilities of local union officers, not just to national leaders but to their members, again, the workers who elected them, set policy, etc., in particular when these members were in disagreement with national policies?
SEIU lawyer, Leon Dayan, repeated that there was a long-term conspiracy, something the jury had not found in 2010, and argued that the duties of the UHW officers and staff to the national and the local were one and the same – hence asserting that the elected local union officers and leaders were essentially no more than an administrative arm of the national union.
Speaking after the hearing, Siegel said the outcome was important for two reasons, first “to remove these entirely unfair judgments, still hanging over the heads of the sixteen defendants.” In this he said he was optimistic.
Second, on the larger issues, he said he was worried that the case raised issues that could prove “very dangerous for union activists. It took a law – Landrum Griffin Act, 1959 – in part designed to protect rank-and-file workers, and turned it on its head, using it as a vehicle for payback against dissenting local union officers and members.”
Back to the streets. At the same time these workers were in court – fighting for the right to have a union, one of their own choosing – nurses at Sutter Health were on strike at ten northern California hospitals. Their walkout, the fourth strike at Sutter since September, came as union officials and Sutter management continued to clash over sick leave, retirement benefits, health care payments, patient care conditions and other issues.
“Nurses at Sutter facilities are facing an unprecedented attack on their practice the scope of which we have not seen in over 20 years,” said Zenei Cortez, co-president of CNA/NNU. “Nurses everywhere are unifying to resist Sutter’s policies of unprecedented cuts in vital patient services for our communities and deterioration of patient care standards in our hospitals.”
The strike affected 4,400 RNs , as well as hundreds of respiratory, X-ray and other technicians at three Alta Bates Summit Medical Center facilities in Berkeley and Oakland, Mills-Peninsula Health Services hospitals in Burlingame and San Mateo, Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, San Leandro Hospital, Sutter Delta in Antioch, Sutter Solano in Vallejo, Novato Community Hospital.
“We don’t believe that Sutter needs to be demanding these onerous and unwarranted cuts from nurses because they are an extremely profitable operation that operates as what I call J.P. Morgan West,” said a California Nurses Association spokesperson. Sutter Health has made over $4.2 billion in profits since 2005, according to CNA. “They’re making decisions on what provides the best return for their shareholders, not for patient care,” he said.
Following the San Francisco hearing, a delegation of NUHW members, clad in red tee-shirts, headed for a noon rally across the Bay at Alta-Bates Summit. June, of course, has not been a good month for labor in the US, particularly in Wisconsin where the electoral turn into a (predictable) catastrophe. It’s far from all over, however. The fight-back continues, including here, in California’s booming healthcare industry.
Cal Winslow is the author of Labor’s Civil War in California, PM Press, 2012 (second edition, revised and expanded), an editor of Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below during the Long Seventies (Verso, 2010), and an editor of West of Eden, Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press, 2012). He is a Fellow at UC Berkeley, Director of the Mendocino Institute and associated with the Bay Area collective, Retort. He can be reached at cwinslow@berkeley.edu
TEACHERS versus NURSES???? See who was on the SEIU team!
Head Counsel Emma Leheny, the real decision-maker for California Teachers Association?
CTA head counsel Emma Leheny represented the union that caved in to Kaiser, SEIU, allowing cuts for nurses, and affirming the power of union officials over their members. Leheny is exactly the type of lawyer that CTA's corrupt officials like to have.SEIU v. NUHW
Click to see entire decision affirming lower court judgment
FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 09-15855
D.C. No. 3:09-cv-00404-WHA
SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL
UNION; DAVID REGAN; ELISEO
MEDINA, as Trustees for SEIU
United Healthcare Workers West
and fiduciaries of the SEIU United
Healthcare WorkersWest and
Joint Employer Education Fund;
SEIU UNITED HEALTHCARE
WORKERSWEST, an unincorporated
association and fiduciary of the
SEIU United Healthcare Workers
West and Joint Employer
Education Fund; REBECCA COLLINS,
as a participant in the SEIU
United Healthcare WorkersWest
and Joint Employer Education
Fund,
Plaintiffs-Appellees,
OPINION v.
NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
WORKERS; JOHN BORSOS; AARON
BRICKMAN; GAIL BUHLER; WILL
CLAYTON; JOAN EMSLIE; GLENN
GOLDSTEIN; MARK KIPFER; GABRIEL
KRISTAL; PAUL KUMAR; BARBARA
LEWIS; FREJA NELSON; FRED
SEAVEY; IAN SELDEN; SAL ROSSELLI;
JOHN VELLARDITA; PHYLLIS
WILLETT,
Defendants-Appellants.
______________________________
SEIU v. NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of California
William H. Alsup, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted
January 14, 2010--San Francisco, California
Filed March 15, 2010
Before: Myron H. Bright,* Michael Daly Hawkins, and
Milan D. Smith, Jr., Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge Bright
*The Honorable Myron H. Bright, Senior United States Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit, sitting by designation.
______________________________
SEIU v. NATIONAL UNION OF HEALTHCARE
COUNSEL
Jeffrey B. Demain (argued), Stephen P. Berzon, Peter D.
Nussbaum, Jonathan Weissglass, San Francisco, California,
Robert M. Weinberg, Leon Dayan, Washington, DC, Glenn
Rothner, and Emma Leheny, Pasadena, California, for the
plaintiffs-appellees.
Daniel Siegel (argued), Jose Luis Fuentes, and Dean Royer,
Oakland, California, for the defendants-appellants.
Friday, August 24, 2012
California labor board files complaint against SEIU in Fresno election for voter intimidation
See all posts re SEIU.
Judge rules against SEIU in California fight
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post
July 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. It is now up to the National Labor Relations Board to decide whether to call a second election, as the judge recommends.
Leaders of the breakaway union noted that the ruling came at the same time as SEIU and other unions are arguing in favor of new rules proposed by the labor relations board to reduce employer coercion against workers before union elections.
“SEIU has been promoting itself an as advocate for labor law reform and workers, and against coercion and intimidation, but no institution has done more to coerce and thwart workers about which union they want to join,” said John Borsos, vice president of the breakaway union...
California labor board files complaint against SEIU in Fresno election for voter intimidation
NUHW.org
AUGUST 22, 2012
The California Public Employment Relations Board has filed an official complaint against SEIU-UHW West for its conduct in the 2009 Fresno homecare election.
Citing SEIU’s “physical and verbal threats,” “menacing and abusive behavior,” “unlawful destruction and removal” of property and a campaign of lies intended to mislead 10,000 Fresno homecare workers into voting to stay in SEIU, the board has affirmed the serious charges brought by homecare workers against SEIU.
NUHW President Sal Rosselli spoke out in support of the board’s decision,
“Today’s complaint validates entirely what Fresno homecare workers have said about what they experienced from SEIU. Threats, destruction of property, mail tampering, abusive behavior and violations of workers’ rights, all waged in a deliberate campaign of intimidation by SEIU following the direct instructions of Dave Regan, an ethically bankrupt leader who sits atop SEIU-UHW and serves on the SEIU International Executive Board to this day.”
Judge rules against SEIU in California fight
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post
July 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. It is now up to the National Labor Relations Board to decide whether to call a second election, as the judge recommends.
Leaders of the breakaway union noted that the ruling came at the same time as SEIU and other unions are arguing in favor of new rules proposed by the labor relations board to reduce employer coercion against workers before union elections.
“SEIU has been promoting itself an as advocate for labor law reform and workers, and against coercion and intimidation, but no institution has done more to coerce and thwart workers about which union they want to join,” said John Borsos, vice president of the breakaway union...
California labor board files complaint against SEIU in Fresno election for voter intimidation
NUHW.org
AUGUST 22, 2012
The California Public Employment Relations Board has filed an official complaint against SEIU-UHW West for its conduct in the 2009 Fresno homecare election.
Citing SEIU’s “physical and verbal threats,” “menacing and abusive behavior,” “unlawful destruction and removal” of property and a campaign of lies intended to mislead 10,000 Fresno homecare workers into voting to stay in SEIU, the board has affirmed the serious charges brought by homecare workers against SEIU.
NUHW President Sal Rosselli spoke out in support of the board’s decision,
“Today’s complaint validates entirely what Fresno homecare workers have said about what they experienced from SEIU. Threats, destruction of property, mail tampering, abusive behavior and violations of workers’ rights, all waged in a deliberate campaign of intimidation by SEIU following the direct instructions of Dave Regan, an ethically bankrupt leader who sits atop SEIU-UHW and serves on the SEIU International Executive Board to this day.”
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
200 San Diego Kaiser Workers Strike for Fourth Time
I am personally familiar with Mary Ann Barnes' level of honesty. She supported the actions described here.
200 Local Kaiser Workers Strike for Fourth Time
24-hour strike aims to protect health care and retirement benefits
By Lauren Steussy
Jan 31, 2012
NBCSanDiego
Over 200 Kaiser workers went on strike Tuesday.
Workers at Kaiser Permanente are lining up in front of facilities across California to bring awareness to contract disputes with Kaiser's mental health and optical employees.
Statewide, 4,000 National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) employees will strike for 24-hours Tuesday. It is expected to be one of the biggest strikes in Kaiser's history, since two other unions will also walk out.
The disputes center around proposed cuts to retirement and health care benefits.
Over 200 of those NUHW employees work in San Diego. It's the group's fourth walkout since contract negotiations began in 2010. The most recent one since Tuesday's was in September.
Workers on strike say Kaiser's disputes affect not only their own health care and benefits, but also patient care.
"We've worked hard to make Kaiser successful," said Sarah Eberst, a Lincensed Clinical Social Worker with NUHW, "but we don't want that to come at the cost of pateint care or at the cost of our own retirement benefits or healthcare."
In April, Kaiser sent an economic proposal back to the unions, which have not negotiated since, according to MaryAnn Barnes, Senior Vice President and Executive Director Health Plan and Hospital for Kaiser in San Diego.
"We're very disappointed, and we need to see movement in the negotiations," Barnes said. "We're willing to negotiate in good faith, but we are not getting the same kind of reaction from NUHW."
All Kaiser hospitals and medical offices are expected to remain open during the strike, with Kaiser relying on replacement workers and nurse managers for additional staffing. This is possible because a very small group of the workers are actually on strike today, Barnes said.
"When Kaiser is making billions of dollars of profit per year," Eberst said, "It's not okay to be cutting back on employees retirement and health care."
Source: 200 Local Kaiser Workers Strike for Fourth Time | NBC San Diego
200 Local Kaiser Workers Strike for Fourth Time
24-hour strike aims to protect health care and retirement benefits
By Lauren Steussy
Jan 31, 2012
NBCSanDiego
Over 200 Kaiser workers went on strike Tuesday.
Workers at Kaiser Permanente are lining up in front of facilities across California to bring awareness to contract disputes with Kaiser's mental health and optical employees.
Statewide, 4,000 National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) employees will strike for 24-hours Tuesday. It is expected to be one of the biggest strikes in Kaiser's history, since two other unions will also walk out.
The disputes center around proposed cuts to retirement and health care benefits.
Over 200 of those NUHW employees work in San Diego. It's the group's fourth walkout since contract negotiations began in 2010. The most recent one since Tuesday's was in September.
Workers on strike say Kaiser's disputes affect not only their own health care and benefits, but also patient care.
"We've worked hard to make Kaiser successful," said Sarah Eberst, a Lincensed Clinical Social Worker with NUHW, "but we don't want that to come at the cost of pateint care or at the cost of our own retirement benefits or healthcare."
In April, Kaiser sent an economic proposal back to the unions, which have not negotiated since, according to MaryAnn Barnes, Senior Vice President and Executive Director Health Plan and Hospital for Kaiser in San Diego.
"We're very disappointed, and we need to see movement in the negotiations," Barnes said. "We're willing to negotiate in good faith, but we are not getting the same kind of reaction from NUHW."
All Kaiser hospitals and medical offices are expected to remain open during the strike, with Kaiser relying on replacement workers and nurse managers for additional staffing. This is possible because a very small group of the workers are actually on strike today, Barnes said.
"When Kaiser is making billions of dollars of profit per year," Eberst said, "It's not okay to be cutting back on employees retirement and health care."
Source: 200 Local Kaiser Workers Strike for Fourth Time | NBC San Diego
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