SEIU-UHW Kaiser Workers:
Membership Action Committee (MAC) Recommends
VOTE NO
on the Tentative Agreement!
Reject the Labor Union/Management Pact to Degrade the Quality of Health Care and Attack our Rights as Union Members!
Send the Bargaining Team Back to the Table!
Union Should Stand with the Workers, Not Management!
Now is the Time to Fight to Improve our Working Conditions!
For a Printable Version of this Post Click HERE
To Read the Tentative Agreement Click HERE
Kaiser-SEIU-UHW’s TA is an insult to Kaiser workers and our communities and must be strongly rejected with a NO VOTE. The time is now to make a real fight to improve our working conditions, assert our dignity, and secure a prosperous future for ourselves and the next generation of healthcare workers.
Our union leadership is lying and trying to convince us that we’ve won a huge victory with this TA. If they mean a victory for Kaiser and not the workers, then they are correct. What this TA actually includes is: an insultingly low wage increase that maintains wage disparities between regions, allows Kaiser to dictate when and how to outsource and subcontract jobs for the benefit of “strengthening the company”, does not hold Kaiser accountable for violations of contract and previous outsourcing, tries to force a change to mail prescription orders that eliminates warehouse jobs and will eliminate pharmacy jobs in the long run, that gives management the right to censorship over the union’s political positions and undermines the union’s democratic right to intervene in elections and influence legislation that would make healthcare a right and improve our labor rights, contains no staffing ratios whatsoever, and absolutely no changes to the terrible working conditions in our job sites. Is the union leadership fighting for the workers or for Kaiser management? We pay dues to expect the union to represent workers’ interests in bargaining negotiations, not to look after and facilitate the profit-making schemes of Kaiser.
Memorandums of Understandings (MOU’s) undercut the contract, render the contract protections useless, and only serve management’s abuse of power
Bargaining is supposed to hold management accountable for contract violations and abuses of management power and make significant improvements in our working conditions. This TA does nothing but absolve Kaiser of all the past contract violations, including outsourcing, and it opens the road for future similar and escalated aggressions. The TA is filled with “Memorandums of understanding,” better described as “yes, no, maybe so” promissory statements whose main aim is to increase the already ample flexibility Kaiser has to defy the contract. These memorandums leave open the door for interpretation and for disputes to be solved between “external union-management partnership committees” that are not based on the actual contract rules. Are we supposed to rely on promises from Kaiser? We are old enough to know we cannot place our futures on good promises from the very people who make our daily lives miserable. These memorandum statements only serve management to push beyond the actual contract and to excuse their violations of the contract and their attacks on workers. We need a TA that is clear and unequivocal in protecting our contract rights and restricts Kaiser’s abuse of power. If we allow this TA to be enforced, not only will we be setting ourselves up to lose our contract protections on the job, but this will also set the standard for healthcare union contracts nationwide.
Union members and stewards cannot defend contract rights that do not exist in a union contract. Although some of our union leaders are glad to hold management’s hand at the table to rely on the kindness of their hearts, most union members actually need written contract protections to defend our labor rights.
The SEIU leadership says we have won things that management has not actually agreed to in the written contract. This is pure dishonesty and plain wrong. Essentially, we are allowing management to create a handbook to interpret the contract at will whenever they deem it necessary to break the rules that they supposedly agreed to.
National union leaders decry the shrinking unionized workforce over the last decades in America. At the same time too many of these same union leaders are facilitating management’s campaign to weaken the unions. For those of us who have wondered why management continues to disrespect us at work and ignore the contract, why they push us to our limits of what is physically and mentally possible to accomplish at work, and why the union isn’t fighting back, this TA is the clearest example of that. These kinds of agreements with a focus on an abusive partnership, rather than contractual gains, bending over backwards to leave contracts aside in favor of memorandums of understanding that place all power in the hands of management, and uses the union leadership as an extension of management to enforce all this crap is the reason why work sucks so much and unions are shrinking.
Voting no on this TA and preparing to strike is the only way to put a stop to all of this and to finally make some lasting gains and strong union contracts.
Worker’s Strikes in the early 90’s Won Significant Gains for Kaiser Workers, Not an Abusive Partnership.
For the last several weeks we have been preparing for the fight of our lives, finally seeing union representatives in our buildings and our union leaders condemning Kaiser’s abuses of power and refusal to bargain. We voted almost unanimously, 98%, to go on strike to defend our rights and improve our working conditions. Now we are being told to forget the past, to embrace our abuser and accept no improvements to our working conditions and no guarantees of our contractual rights, in favor of “rebuilding the partnership.” This is unacceptable. The partnership has yielded nothing for the workers. It has only increased the power of Kaiser management. We should not allow the union to hold back our anger, hopes and aspirations for ourselves and our families when we are close to winning.
SEIU leadership agreed to form a labor-management partnership with Kaiser in the mid-1990’s in order to leave behind the period of the strikes that won the rights we still hold today, and to work with Kaiser management to improve their business finances at the expense of Kaiser workers. What the partnership did was to put the brakes on workers’ struggles that could go beyond wages and benefits. SEIU leaders wrongly agreed, among other things, to freeze pay for 7 years and agreed to no more strikes(!) while allowing Kaiser to bend the rules on labor relations and to facilitate economic growth on the backs of workers with the help of SEIU leadership. Fast forward 20 years later to now, Kaiser is making record profits with 36 billion in reserves, shattering their own numbers year after year. Meanwhile, year after year, job after job has been outsourced, Kaiser has continued to violate the contract, pay has remained stagnant despite rapid inflation, with work piling up for workers enforced by increasing management abuse through speed ups, impossible staffing, and vague disciplinary rules. This is not a relationship we can embrace, unless we want our jobs to be the next on the chopping block so more Kaiser executives can get their millions of dollars of salary while we starve. We must stand up to our abuser. We have more power and support on our side, the GM workers are showing this to be true with each day that their strike grows and GM weakens.
GM Workers are Exposing the Fallacy of the “master-slave partnership”—The Same Applies to Us at Kaiser
Thousands of GM workers on strike are heroes to every worker in America, unionized or not. Through their strike, UAW workers are exercising their power to alter the direction of this nation out of the dark days of labor concessions, the tremendous weakening of the unions, pervasive racism, immigration bashing and divisiveness that have left our nation a barely recognizable shadow of what it once was and what we want it to be. GM workers helped bail out the auto companies during the last economic recession by sacrificing pay, benefits, agreeing to wage inequalities for new hires, and agreeing to not strike. They formed a partnership with management. The UAW leadership, like our SEIU leadership, then formed a so-called “labor-management partnership” with the GM management. Now GM is generating record profits with exorbitant salaries for their executives, while their workers struggle to live paycheck to paycheck, working under increasingly worsening conditions at the mercy of GM management. The GM workers’ story is the Kaiser workers’ story.
