So far, the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) has been ineffectual in its attempts to get a vise grip on southern Nevada hospitals. Will that last? Well, with SEIU resorting to relentless tactics, the results may be costly if Nevadans (and all Americans) don't learn the truth about the motives behind this union giant. 

The stakes are high for SEIU Local 1107, which is in simultaneous contract negotiations this spring with Desert Springs, Valley, St. Rose, Sunrise and UMC hospitals. Having simply walked away from a failed organizing attempt at Spring Valley Hospital late last year and an outright lost election at MountainView Hospital several months earlier, the union must now concoct a card trick or two to justify its anticipated raise in annual dues - not to mention providing a believable success story upon which to base negotiating efforts. 

While increasing dues, revenues remain Local 1107's primary business objective. Bragging rights are also at stake. The SEIU was one of the leaders of the breakaway Change to Win (CTW) group of unions, which fractured the AFL-CIO last year. Now that the dust has settled, CTW member unions have to justify breaking up the House of Labor by demonstrating that their brand of big cigars is more effective than the old. 

When CTW held its first annual convention in Las Vegas this March, Culinary's D. Taylor and John Wilhelm welcomed their union brothers and sisters who were secure in their hegemony over the major Strip hotels and casinos (except for the still union-free Venetian). Meanwhile other SEIU locals across the country were waging aggressive, well-financed corporate campaigns against embattled health systems in California (Sutter Health), Ohio (Catholic Healthcare Partners) and Illinois (Advocate Health). 

By comparison, Local 1107's Jane McAlevey had little to boast about. Last year, there was a minor flap over union registered nurses (RN) at two Valley Health System hospitals. They were being disciplined for wearing pro-union buttons on the job got more chuckles than serious attention. They also drew no more than an obligatory slap on the hospitals' wrists from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

Then, shortly before the CTW delegates arrived in Las Vegas, SEIU 1107 represented technicians at Desert Springs Hospital. The technicians filed for decertification with the NLRB. The union predictably filed objections and the matter currently remains before the NLRB, but the decertification attempt may reflect deeper underlying member dissatisfaction with the union. 

SEIU National President Andy Stern didn't do much for morale either. In February, Stern joined a sparsely attended union demonstration at Desert Springs Hospital, which has an RN bargaining unit. But he seemed confused as to why he was there, especially since contract negotiations were several months off. Stern pulled out his standard Wal-Mart bashing speech, which had everyone mystified, including hospital administrators. 


Sudden Failure of Defined Benefit Pensions

Local 1107's current rough patch isn't surprising. The failed organizing effort at Spring Valley and MountainView Hospitals reflected the broader national trend of unions losing an ever-larger percentage of secret ballot elections. Observers cite many reasons, but probably the most reasonable is that employers have gotten smarter, and are keeping employees happier with competitive wages, benefits packages and more collaborative workplaces, taking away the incentive for employees to join a union and pay union dues.

Additionally, the sudden and dramatic failure of union-sponsored benefit pension plans in the airlines, steel and automobile industries (among others) has punctured the credibility of the standard pitch that a union-sponsored defined benefit plan is the key to a secure retirement. As more and more companies switch to 401(k) plans, employees are seeing the benefits of "owning" their retirement plans. 

Spring Valley and the Valley Health System's (VHS) three other hospitals in Las Vegas present a good case study of the union's problem. Two of the hospitals, Desert Springs and Valley Medical Center, have long-standing SEIU nurse bargaining units, as well as contracts for smaller units with Culinary and Operating Engineers. 

When Local 1107 tried to organize nurses at Spring Valley, it could not get traction on any of its usual issues. The nurses were already being paid at or above competitive wages, and they understood that wage increases at both union and non-union hospitals in Las Vegas over the last few years were driven more by market conditions than organizing threats or collective bargaining.

The union's push for a defined-benefit pension plan to replace the hospital's 401(k) retirement plan sputtered once employees better understood the plan's features, and was further undermined by almost daily barrage of news headlines about yet another defined benefit retirement plan going bankrupt. 

Democrat Richard Perkins, along with the Local 1107, has attempted to brand for-profit hospitals as if they are siphoning profits from Las Vegas operations to their out-of-state parent companies.

SEIU Had Nothing to Offer

The union's promise to win fairness and respect in the workplace was a non-starter, too, because Spring Valley Hospital CEO Karla Perez and her staff are well-liked, fair and proactive in responding to employee workplace issues. Had McAlevey checked in advance, she might have recognized that the union had nothing to offer the nurses that they didn't already have. 

Instead the union collected employee signatures calling for an NLRB election. Many were gathered in stealth mode, often during visits to employees' homes or at meetings in restaurants away from the hospital, so as not to alert hospital management. Many nurses, it turned out, were not fully aware of what they were signing. It became clear that the organizing effort had failed when large numbers of nurses began going through the official process of requesting that their signatures be removed from the original election petition. Because card check denies the protection of a secret ballot, it leaves employees vulnerable to intimidation and high-pressure union tactics like home visits.

Master Contracts Are The Holy Grail

No one seriously expects that Local 1107's embarrassment at Spring Valley will deter it from its primary goal, which is to negotiate a master contract with the Valley Health System, just as the SEIU and California Nurses Association have done with Catholic Healthcare West in California. Master contracts are the Holy Grail because they give healthcare unions the power to call strikes at a health system's facilities simultaneously. This is the ultimate financial leverage.

In fact, Spring Valley was something of an anomaly because the SEIU and other CTW unions have largely abandoned traditional organizing, pushing instead for a process called "card check neutrality." With card check, employees are denied the right to a secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. Instead, the union needs only to obtain the signatures of a majority of employees to be certified, a process which essentially amounts to signing a petition. 

Employers who accept neutrality basically agree not to oppose the union or to educate employees about union membership. This should make it easier for the union to win when there is an election. But at MountainView, which agreed to neutrality and more or less had its hands tied, RNs nonetheless rejected Local 1107 by an almost 2-to-1 margin. 


Single Ballot Most Democratic

Three-fourths of Americans questioned in a new opinion poll by Opinion Research Corporation believe that secret ballot elections are the most fair and most democratic voting method for employees deciding whether or not to form a union. By contrast, only 12 percent believed that the petition-style card check method was the most fair and democratic. In the minds of many, the union's emphasis on card check raises the question, "Why are they afraid of the secret ballot?"

But even with card check and neutrality, individual organizing campaigns are costly and time consuming. Rather than risk losing or committing resources, SEIU has increasingly turned to a strategy called the "corporate campaign."

Simply put, a corporate campaign is an attack by a union on the ability of a company or industry to conduct its routine business.

Corporate campaigns use a variety of tactics to damage a company's reputation, brand and ability to do business as a way of forcing it to accept card check or a master agreement. The strategy is so-named because it is aimed at corporate leadership rather than employees. 


Exploit Vulnerabilities in Stakeholder Relations

The corporate campaign has been extremely effective within healthcare, which is one of the few areas where union membership has grown in recent years. By some estimates, upwards of 70 percent of healthcare employees who have joined unions in the past five years did so as a result of corporate campaigns. The strategy is particularly attractive when the target is a health system and the campaign cost can be spread over multiple facilities.

Corporate campaigns exploit vulnerabilities in the critical stakeholder relationships on which all companies depend. This broad strategic approach is then implemented through tactics that range from highly sophisticated financial and legislative initiatives to high-profile boycotts and demonstrations by community and religious leaders, and celebrities. 

In California, where the SEIU is attempting to force Sutter Health to agree to a master contract, the union used its influence with the union-dominated California Public Employees Retirement Fund (CalPERS) to cancel contracts with Sutter Health for some 50,000 employees enrolled in the CalPERS health plan. More recently, it filed an environmental lawsuit to block construction of a new Sutter medical center in downtown Sacramento. 


Naked Power Plays

Both moves were naked power plays designed to cause Sutter Health financial pain. Ironically, the union claimed to be motivated by concerns for patient safety while in reality these and similar tactics actually reduced patient access to quality healthcare. 

Advocate Health, a Chicago-based health system, has been the target of a similar SEIU corporate campaign for the last three years. After traditional organizing attempts failed, the SEIU used its influence with elected officials to launch a series of increasingly high-profile government hearings and pseudo-investigations into Advocate's charity care and collections practices. 

While the various forums proved to be more smoke than substance, they succeeded in temporarily shaking community confidence in the health system, and resulted in the Illinois Attorney General last year proposing legislation which would deny tax exempt status to Advocate Health and other non-profit healthcare systems, which do not provide levels of charity care dictated by the union. 

As is the case in California, the SEIU corporate campaign against Advocate had nothing to do with patient care and rarely raised issues related to employee compensation or benefits since both health systems were noted for positive employee relations, and providing competitive wages and benefits. The goal was to force Advocate to capitulate, agree to a master contract, and enable the SEIU to add thousands of Advocates employees as dues-paying members. 

Such corporate campaign tactics have been used infrequently against hospitals in Nevada. But with Las Vegas being such a highly visible union stronghold, it seems only a question of when, not whether, Local 1107 will roll out a corporate campaign targeted at VHS and the other non-union hospitals.

In some ways, the campaign has already started. For several years, Local 1107, along with political allies like former Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, have attempted to brand for-profit hospitals as siphoning profits from Las Vegas operations to their out-of-state parent companies. 

During the last legislative session, Perkins made headlines when he vowed to introduce a bill that would require Nevada healthcare providers to reinvest a portion of their profits into the local community. Perkins said the state needs legislation that "prohibits these out-of-state corporations from harvesting our pocketbooks to ship millions of dollars back east." One didn't need an interpreter to know who Perkins was threatening.


Hospitals Boost Nevada Economy

As is usually the case with union corporate campaigns, the mud-slinging had no basis in reality. The Nevada Hospital Association had already produced an effective rebuttal in the form of a detailed study titled "The Contributions of Hospitals to the Nevada Economy" (available for download at www.nvha.net/index.htm), which demonstrated that the state's hospitals were actually providing a major financial shot in the arm to the Nevada economy.

The Valley Health System provides a dramatic case in point. During the past five years, VHS has reinvested more than $200 million in new facilities and equipment in its Las Vegas facilities. It employs more than 4,000 people in southern Nevada, a great many of them in high-wage professional positions, with an annual labor cost of $270 million. When traditional multiplier effects are factored in, the health system will inject a projected $3.7 billion into the local economy over the next five years.

Ultimately, a number of union-sponsored measures aimed at for-profit hospitals, including one to cap emergency-room fees, were defeated in the last legislative session. But many, including mandated staff ratios and perhaps a new version of fee ceilings, seem likely to be in play when the Legislature reconvenes. In fact, by the time this article goes to press, Local 1107 will have held a legislative reception at its new union hall to begin talking with legislators about its priorities for the 2007 session.


Driving a Wedge between Employees and Management

In the meantime, the most immediate action will be focused around contract negotiations, which began in earnest in mid-April. In what appears to be a continuing hard line being pursued by union chief negotiator McAlevey, Local 1107's flyers to union members at Desert Springs and Valley Medical Centers are confrontational and clearly designed to drive a wedge between employees and hospital administration. They refer to managers as "bosses," and denigrate hospital communications as "propaganda."

Local 1107's negotiating priorities are fairly predictable - higher wages, defined-benefit pension and staffing ratios. Their literature boasts of wage and benefit breakthroughs achieved in prior negotiations with St. Rose, Southern Hills, Desert Springs and Valley, when indeed the hospitals were already committed to the enhancements in order to remain competitive with existing market conditions. 

But never far from the surface in Local 1107's literature or rhetoric is the Holy Grail - as a recent flyer plainly described it, "The bargaining committees voted for a valley-wide 'master contract' along with all the other hospital employees throughout the Vegas Valley." 

A valley-wide master contract would put Local 1107 in the boss' seat when it comes to healthcare in southern Nevada. Already there have been rumors of rolling strikes and other forms of disruption over the summer to achieve the goal. 

If SEIU campaigns in other parts of the country are a fair example, then punitive legislation and similar tactics would also be part of the package, all couched in rhetoric, painting the union as the champion of patient safety and consumer fairness, and hospital administrators as "bosses."

Sadly, the union can say and do just about anything it wants because, in the end, it has no responsibility for patient care and safety, employee compensation, recruiting and training new nurses and doctors, or reinvesting hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment and facilities. 

As the campaigns against Sutter Health in California and Advocate Health in Illinois have shown, the SEIU is prepared to bring health systems to their financial knees, if that's what it takes to win a master contract. And if the consequences are less (rather than more) access to healthcare, overcrowded emergency rooms, or even hospitals shuttering their doors, well, so be it.

The strategy is not a pleasant one. Richard Trumpka, former Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, once called it "death by a thousand cuts."

Bruce Raynor, President of UNITE-HERE, one of SEIU's Change to Win partner unions, described it this way: "Employers think we are out of our minds and the result is we win, because we're willing to do what's necessary. We're not businessmen, and at the end of the day, they are. If we're willing to cost them enough, they'll give in."

This barely disguised disregard for patient safety or employees' rights to the secret ballot is the sobering side of the SEIU campaign currently underway. LW