The Service Employees International Union is certainly no stranger to playing political hardball. But its recent efforts to use the initiative process to gain an upper hand in labor negotiations spit in the eye of the democratic process. Unfortunately, the strategy seems to be working.
Last December, SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West president Dave Regan threatened to spend $4 million to collect signatures for two ballot measures, and up to an additional $20 million on a ballot campaign, if the hospitals did not work with the union, according to the Wall Street Journal. The union represents approximately 90,000 of the 400,000 hospital workers in California, and is looking to add to its ranks.
“It became clear that the one thing they wanted we cannot do for them,” California Hospital Association spokeswoman Jan Emerson-Shea told the Journal. “We cannot force hospitals to allow SEIU to come in and hold elections and remain neutral.”
The union has been collecting signatures for measures that would have prohibited hospitals from charging more than 25 percent above the actual cost of providing care and capped the compensation of hospital executives at $450,000 a year. The San Jose Mercury News reported that this is $60,000 below the $510,000 median salary earned by hospital CEOs nationwide in 2010.
But the measures, which would have exempted public and specialty hospitals, were nothing more than a bargaining chip for the union. They had next to nothing to do with hospital workers, but hospital officials estimated the cost-cap measure would have reduced hospital revenues by $12 billion a year, according to a Los Angeles Times article. That would surely have led to major service and employee cutbacks, and possibly hospital closures.
The union used the same ballot measure threat in 2012, and in Oregon this year.
The CHA ultimately caved in to the prospect of an expensive and bruising ballot campaign. Under the deal, the SEIU-UHW agreed to abandon its efforts in exchange for a new labor agreement and the establishment of a joint $100 million fund to be used by the union and hospitals to lobby the state Legislature — and possibly fund a November 2016 ballot initiative — to increase Medi-Cal reimbursement rates or obtain more federal matching funds for the state.
The SEIU’s strategy is akin to that of trial lawyers who extort money from businesses by threatening them with expensive lawsuits for minor violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act unless they settle for thousands of dollars.
It is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to pressure hospitals in the state to allow the union to organize more workers, under the guise of serving as some sort of patient-cost watchdog. While not illegal, it certainly violates the democratic spirit of the initiative process, and says something about the credibility of a union that employs such tactics.
— Copley News Service
