Decertification

UDR Story

• Carpenter groups in NY and NJ split from UBC
• SEIU holds on at NLRB. Autocracy tops Democracy.

  In an NLRB election in October, 43,500 Kaiser healthcare workers in California got what had been denied to them in the Service Employees International Union, the right to choose which set of officers should run their local union.

• Opposition wins most delegates from big SEIU local

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  More than ten years ago, Cathy Hackett and Jim Hard were elected the top leaders of SEIU Local 1000. One of the early supporters of their democratic reform movement was Alex Hernandez. Since then, relations have changed drastically. In elections for the local's 61 delegates to the SEIU convention, an opposition group, led by Hernandez, contested 49 slots and won 33, a clear majority. In a surprising upset, Donna Snodgrass, an insurgent leader, came in second and Hernandez eighth, edging out Hackett and Hard who came in twelfth and seventeenth.

• If you can't woo 'em, sue 'em! An ingenious twist in punishing dissent in the SEIU

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  The Service Employees International Union, via the trustee it has imposed on its Local 134, has come up with an ingenious device to discourage disenchanted members from seeking a more congenial affiliation. The solution is not by convincing them to stay but by taking retaliatory action in federal court against their leaders. This is one of those suits which, win or lose, achieves its objective by the very act of filing.

• Service Employees: MASS merger in Local 888

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  The following is based on accounts from several Local 888 members who prefer to remain anonymous.

  In August, 2003 the Service Employees International Union merged several locals in Massachusetts to form a 12,000-member, mostly state and municipal sector, Local 888. Included in the new statewide local is a 1,500-member unit of professional staff at UMass Amherst and Boston that used to belong to Local 509, a union with a strong democratic tradition.

• Quest for democracy persists inside SEIU

  While attention is riveted on the bitter battle in California between the Service Employees International Union and the new National Union of Healthcare Workers, many SEIU members who are not involved in that conflict are convinced that their road to union reform remains inside the SEIU in a continuing campaign to democratize the union. And they can report some successes, notably in Massachusetts Local 888 and in California Local 521.At the SEIU convention in June last year, rank and filers from several locals came together in a reform caucus, SMART --- for SEIU Members Active for Reform Today. The caucus organized as a permanent body after the convention.