Voting began
Monday in one of the most disputed union elections in
recent years. The contest pits the powerful Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) against the upstart National Union of
Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which was created last year by former
officials of a SEIU affiliate in Oakland, California. Tens of
thousands of workers will vote between now and October 4 on which
union, if any, will represent them. At stake are
44,000 members and an estimated $40 million in annual dues.
(The vote tally starts on October 6.) Also at stake is how labor
organizing may look in the near future.
SEIU suffered a loss
to NUHW in Southern California in January, so the current
contest is major test for SEIU’s new national president, Mary
Kay Henry, who took over from her notorious predecessor Andy Stern
last May. Henry seems committed to this fight, and for good reason.
She worked alongside Stern during his tenure as president, and
helped to implement some of his more controversial policies,
including his efforts to create a handful of giant mega-locals,
through mergers such as the one imposed on SEIU’s California health
care affiliates.
NUHW was formed in January 2009 by the former leaders of
SEIU’s Oakland-based affiliate, after a bitter dispute with the
SEIU national leadership. The breakup occurred after SEIU put its
affiliate United Healthcare West (UHW) under trusteeship, throwing out 80
locally elected officers, accusing them of misuse of union
funds.
The national SEIU sought to forcibly merge UHW with a
scandal-ridden Los Angeles-based local, whose president had to step
down in 2008 amid allegations of corruption. Then-UHW President Sal
Rosselli denounced the trusteeship as “an act of desperation by
Stern” to deflect public attention from the Los Angeles scandal,
and claimed that Stern was trying to punish him for fighting the
transfer of his members to the Los Angeles local.
Union power struggles are nothing new, and, as in most,
the dispute between SEIU and NUHW has its share of egos. But this
fight also centers on the future of unionism. To revive unions’
sagging private sector numbers, SEIU, under Stern’s
leadership, has pursued a strategy of increasing union “density,”
which entails increasing the number of union members in the overall
workforce to gain greater clout in negotiations. This often
has meant compromising on contract terms to lessen
employer resistance.
Rosselli, by contrast, has preferred to drive a hard
bargain to gain the best contract terms for existing members,
even while trying to organize new ones. Throughout this
conflict, Henry worked alongside Stern to pursue the goal of
greater “density,” which Rosselli has derided as
“organizing workers for the sake of numbers.”
Whichever strategy wins out, it’s safe to say that the
leaders of SEIU and NUHW can agree on at least one thing: support
for the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which can help
both their goals. EFCA’s card check provision would both allow
unions to organize members more easily by effectively eliminating
the secret ballot in organizing elections, while its binding
arbitration provision would allow union negotiators to drive a
harder bargain in the expectation that after 120 days a federally
appointed arbitrator could step in to impose an agreement that is
bound to be no worse for the union than management’s final
offer.
EFCA is currently stalled in Congress, and its chances in
the lame-duck session of Congress are uncertain, but its supporters
are now looking for ways to implement some of its provisions
outside the legislative process.
One such possibility is remote voting. The National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) — which now includes former SEIU counsel
Craig Becker — recently put out a
request for information for vendors to submit proposals “for
the acquisition of electronic voting services to support conducting
secret-ballot elections to determine representation
issues. Specifically, the Agency requires a proven
solution that supports mail, telephone, web-based and/or on-site
electronic voting; that includes the necessary safeguards to ensure
the accuracy, secrecy, observability, transparency, integrity,
accountability, and auditability of Agency-conducted
elections …”
Despite this call for “safeguards,” there is nothing to
deter union organizers from walking up to workers’ homes and
bullying them into entering their secret codes and votes in front
of the organizer. Indeed, the SEIU-NUHW fight shows how remote
voting can lead to vote tampering and intimidation
— including at workers’ homes. In the current campaign, some
workers have accused SEIU of taking mail-in ballots from their
mailboxes and harassed at home to sign. One worker said SEIU even
marked the ballot for her. Others said SEIU opened their marked
ballot and made them change their votes from NUHW to
SEIU.
The campaign in California is proving a testing ground for
new, aggressive organizing tactics. Whichever union wins, worker
freedom may be the ultimate loser.
