Modern News

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is still going ahead with its plans to perpetrate a hostile takeover of California local California Healthcare Workers union (UHC). Naturally, the local isn’t too happy to be forcefully dissolved and integrated into the SEIU national and losing their identity.

The UHC folks with their president Sal Rossi in the lead, are staging all sorts of protests and efforts to deny the SEIU its victory. Rossi has been a thorn in SEIU president Andy Stern’s side for quite a while now.

The SEIU has been trying to mount a massive take over of unions all across the country (whether forcefully or not) with the goal of becoming the biggest union in the nation. SEIU president Stern’s goal has been to create a giant union run from the top down with the locals having little power over their own areas. This is a particularly amusing plan because unions have always been about “democracy” and “local control” of its own destiny yet here is Stern trying to emulate the sort of powermongering, top down control that unions usually fight.

In any case, the UHW raised a special fund to be used on something or another, but the SEIU claims it was “illegal” and meant to be used to fight their takeover. The resulting back and forth lawsuits gave the SEIU another excuse to claim that the UHW is “corrupt” and needs to be taken over to root out the supposed corruption.

It’s a mess of a power struggle, to say the least and amusing in that the whole situation seems to go against the grain of what unions always claim to be.

The UHW has posted their point of view on the “retaliation” on their website.

From our perspective, the mess reveals the hypocrisy of unions all the way around.