Wednesday in court - Wellspring of the members!

Andy Stern, Mary Kay Henry, Anna Burger, Dave Regan, Eliseo Medina, Leon Chow, Steve Trossman, Rebecca Malberg, and SEIU finally rested their case today in federal court!

Readers tell Perez that while the NUHW area of the courtroom is packed with members, staff, supporters, and journalists, attendance on SEIU’s side is down to a skeleton crew consisting of a few senior staffers (staff lawyer Deedee Fitzpatrick and deputy trustee Debbie Schneider have been regulars), PR staffers Steve Trossman and Matt Browner Hamlin (Michelle Ringuette didn’t come back after the first couple of days), someone’s kid, and the “member bloggers”, along with a huge legal team.

Spotted on those sparse SEIU benches today, Mary Kay Henry looking back at the SEIU side and making faces during Sal Rosselli’s testimony. Spotted in the ladies bathroom, Rebecca Malberg frantically snatching handfuls of paper towel and stuffing it in her purse! Maybe that’s where all the UHW documents went?

The day began with cross-examination of SEIU’s email expert (he only makes $250 an hour while the math guy makes $600?!), and the stunning revelation that “double deleting” emails means deleting them and then emptying your trash can! Then came Debbie ssssSchneider, followed by a paralegal from one of SEIU’s law firms, and a security guard from the Sacramento UHW office, all to talk about boxes and data. Perez didn’t hear anything interesting about any of them or about the defendant deposition videos SEIU played.

And then the plaintiffs finally rested their case with about an hour of the day left, and the defense went straight into calling witnesses with Sal Rosselli. As Sal took the stand, readers say there was a palpable feeling of “this is our turn!” in the room, and the energy changed. The jury literally sat up and took notice too, looking more animated, and writing more notes than at any point in the plaintiffs’ case.

Readers say Sal wasn’t in exuberant rally-speech mode, but gave a very sober and clear history of the actions and decisions that led inevitably to the trusteeship – the 2007 SF Weekly article on the nursing home deals, the 2008 convention, the jurisdiction decisions, the trusteeship hearings, and along with it all, the struggle of UHW members to make their international union acknowledge their existence as something more than dues units. Readers say it just sounded like the straight-up truth.

SEIU lawyer Kohlman (“the one with the big ears”) gambled and lost with his cross examination. Faced with a choice between staying calm and trying to subtly steer Rosselli, or going all-out and trying to intimidate him, Kohlman chose the latter strategy (each has its place, there’s no moral judgment here!), sounded out-of-step, and fell flat, failing to get any real concessions from the witness or trip him up.

It’s tricky for the plaintiffs now, because just about any legal concession they might be able to get from a defense witness - for example that UHW’s officers should have obeyed the IEB and not union members - makes SEIU look terrible to the jury, and the defendants look good. It happened today, as SEIU objected repeatedly to Rosselli’s account of democratic processes at UHW on the grounds that they were “irrelevant”, and then turned around and argued in their cross examination that the undemocratic changes to the SEIU constitution made in Puerto Rico (essentially turning all important decisions over to Andy Stern) were an expression of the members’ will! Judge Alsup might insist that appearances don’t matter, but he does so because they do; especially in a case that’s still so legally ambiguous and messy.

Things are getting messier and messier too in the negotiations that happen between the lawyers and the judge when the jury is out. This morning Perez hears the judge accused SEIU of “larding the record”, and called their case “big law firm practice at its worst!”. However, he also insisted that the former UHW staffers must have spent at least a little time planning to be disloyal on SEIU’s dime, or how else would they all have coordinated to quit on the same day? Not a point that make sense to Perez (has Judge Alsup heard of weekends?), but it shows how tense things are getting, as the judge urges the sides to come to some sort of agreement to clarify things for the jury.

The judge wouldn’t give the minute counts he’s given at the end of every other day, but with 200 left in the morning, the plaintiffs must now be very low on time. Just for fun, Perez is going to make a little prediction – SEIU will spend all, or all but a few minutes cross-examining Sal Rosselli. It’s abundantly clear that they’re going to have a hard time making any charges stick, and spending five minutes crossing every witness would just be useless. The real point of all this time and money is to taint NUHW, and winning nothing at all, or just some random finding against a staffer, won’t do that cause any good! That’s why Perez bets they’ll throw it all at Rosselli (who they’ll say is ultimately responsible for everything that happened) and hope they get something they can use!

Now, does anyone want to pay me $600 an hour for my expertise at making semi-informed guesses?