Shredding it up!

Despite months of bargaining by the workers on the elected bargaining team, 1199P double scab Cathy Brady is here to get contracts closed, and by hook or by crook, that's what she's going to do!

Here's the full story, as reported by a couple of readers...

"Last week at Oakland’s Lake Park Retirement Residence, Cathy and fellow scab staffer Davere Godfrey were removed from the break room by security and asked to please continue their harassment of workers out in the hall so people could eat their lunch in peace.

Shop steward Y’vonne Miller describes the scene: “On my break I went into the lounge to enjoy some time to myself and eat my lunch, but there was SEIU. I asked them to leave so I could eat my lunch in peace, but they told me they weren’t going.”

That’s when Y’vonne and her co-worker Terisita Taylor approached security and asked to have SEIU removed from the break room. “People felt like they couldn’t even go in there, because they just didn’t want to be bothered,” Y’vonne said, “ In the past, the union wasn’t allowed to come in and stay for the amount of time management lets these folks come in here and harass us.”

It seems that Cathy and Davere didn’t get much love out in the hall either, where caregivers working hard on shift whizzed by them without so much as even acknowledging their stinking up the place.

So, why the cold shoulder? Well, it could have something to do with the fact that the week before, the facility’s administrator was delivered petitions signed by 75% of the workers along with a letter stating that the employees no longer wished to be represented by SEIU-UHW. In a futile attempt to ignore it all and hope it will just go away, the administrator reportedly called in his secretary and ordered her to “shred this up,” then proceeded to deny having received the letter. “I suggest you go to negotiations,” the administrator told workers.

And that’s what they did. Workers attended bargaining at the Zombie UHW office alongside Davere and chief negotiator Cathy – who apparently refused to cough up a copy of her Pennsylvania local’s nursing home agreement for workers to see (what have you got to hide, Cathy?). Then, just after management sat down at the table workers stood up declaring that SEIU-UHW didn’t have their authority to bargain on their behalf and requested that management not recognize SEIU-UHW as the workers’ representative. They then walked out of bargaining, and were of course followed down the street by SEIU’s goon squad featuring Lisa Gude who promised the workers that “NUHW will never happen.”

But why let a total show of no-confidence from members hold things up?

"The contract was settled despite the elected bargaining team's boycott. Negotiations were attended by one dietary worker and one housekeeper who hadn't been involved prior. Some workers are upset about the process, but the contract was ratified on the next day anyway, primarily because it seems like workers liked the first year wage increase of 6.5%. It's important to remember that prior to SEIU's hijacking, the elected bargaining team did the heavy lifting and brought the gap on wages to only 1%.

All-in-all, the details of exactly what was settled on remain unclear. That's because workers were only given an announcement of the vote that included a brief summary of TAs - highlighting the wage increases and listing non-specific "improvements" to health insurance benefits (oh, and everything else that had been settled on before they got there). When workers asked SEIU for copies of the TAs, they were told they could wait to read it in the contract.

Guess folks will have to wait to find out exactly what "improvements" in health insurance mean. It's my understanding that before this, workers had a proposal on the table that the employer pay 100% of the premiums on the existing plan. They also had been holding out on full retro pay back to the July 31st expiration of the contract, but I hear SEIU settled on 4% back to December instead, so who knows!"

It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it?