Union Battle in California Threatens S.E.I.U

Union Battle in California Threatens S.E.I.U,During his two decades building one of the largest union locals in California, Sal Rosselli earned a reputation as a cunning strategist and street fighter — someone who often vilified hospital chains during contract battles.
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Members of the Service Employees International Union at a Kaiser facility in South San Francisco.
Readers' Comments These days, he is using those brass knuckles on his former colleagues at the Service Employees International Union in a battle that threatens to rip a giant hole in the most powerful union in the nation’s largest state.

The S.E.I.U.’s national leadership ousted Mr. Rosselli last year after a power struggle that ended with a jury finding that he had improperly used member dues to form a breakaway union. Shortly after being ousted, Mr. Rosselli did create a rival union, and now he is trying to lure many of his former members — 43,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente, the largest health care provider in the state.

On Monday, workers at 331 Kaiser facilities across California began voting by mail on whether to bolt the S.E.I.U. and join Mr. Rosselli’s group, the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

A victory would give a vital boost to Mr. Rosselli’s fledgling 6,000-member union, all but assuring its long-term survival. It would also be a huge blow to the 1.9-million-member service employees union, since Mr. Rosselli’s group would gain the stature and dues money to finance a broader war for far more S.E.I.U. members.

Many in the labor movement hail Mr. Rosselli as a fearless champion of bottom-up union democracy who is challenging what he calls the S.E.I.U.’s “sweetheart deals” with employers. But others denounce him as an ego-driven pied piper waging a wasteful civil war within the country’s fastest-growing, most politically active union.

The Kaiser face-off is the biggest union election in the private sector since 1941, when 74,000 workers at Ford Motor’s River Rouge complex in Michigan, then the world’s largest industrial facility, voted to unionize. The Ford vote was a giant step in building the labor movement; some see the Kaiser fight as a major step backward.

“It’s tragic that with so many workers wanting to be organized into unions, so much energy and money are being devoted to the fight at Kaiser,” said William B. Gould IV, a labor law professor at Stanford University and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

With unusual nastiness, the two unions have traded accusations of lying, stealing, fraud and intimidation — not exactly the image the labor movement wants to project as it tries to improve its tattered reputation. In one instance, Mr. Rosselli’s group accused S.E.I.U. activists of threatening some immigrant Kaiser employees with deportation unless they stopped supporting the rival union. Service employee officials say that is a lie concocted by Rosselli partisans with feverish imaginations.

The fratricidal war is a distraction as the November elections approach. The S.E.I.U. has dispatched hundreds of foot soldiers to defeat Mr. Rosselli. Other unions say they wish those activists were campaigning instead to elect union-friendly lawmakers.

Meanwhile, corporate executives can only gloat as they watch the S.E.I.U. — a scourge to many employers because of its aggressive tactics — spend millions of dollars battling not business, but another union. Saying “the S.E.I.U. is putting unimagined resources into this fight,” Mr. Rosselli asserts that his nemesis will spend $40 million on the election; S.E.I.U. officials say they will spend at most one-tenth that amount.