Leno-Migden; The Truth About Ohio ...
by , 2008-05-05
Dear Randy,
Regarding your article "Bay Guardian Backs Leno, Landlords Move to Joe Nation," don't you think Mark Leno deserves equal time here? I'm sure you can find some mistakes made by him as well because he is, after all, human.
And Carole Migden probably would not have endured as much political damage if Assemblyman Leno hadn't tried to unseat a progressive incumbent. Let's play fair here.
Respectfully,
Terrrie Frye
To the Editor:
Apparently not content with having sabotaged a union election for me and 8,000 of my co-workers in Ohio, now the California Nurses Association (CNA) is spreading one fiction after another in an effort to justify its unjustifiable actions.
When I saw what the CNA
had written in the April 25th edition of Beyond Chron, I was dumbfounded. According to the CNA, Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) was "in talks with both the AFL-CIO and SEIU. Faced with this choice, Catholic Healthcare Partners dropped talks with the AFL-CIO, and made a back-room deal for a snap election with SEIU."
Really? Could anyone at the AFL-CIO or CHP corroborate this? Because I can't. I was involved in a campaign with SEIU for three and a half years leading up to this election, and I never saw hide nor hair of the AFL-CIO.
This latest fantasy, of course, builds on CNA's fabrications about a "back room deal" between CHP and its so-called "hand-picked" union, SEIU. Over time, the stories have become bolder and more embellished. The CNA claims, for example, that we CHP nurses and our fellow hospital workers didn't want to join SEIU, that the elections were canceled due to lack of interest on our part, and that the agreement between SEIU and CHP forbade employees from discussing the union and the election.
If this latter claim were true, nobody bothered to tell us. My co-workers and I were talking amongst ourselves, debating the pros and cons.
The notion that SEIU was a company union is even more absurd. CHP did not, and does not, want their employees to form a union—any union. And I should know. In my 30 years as an RN at St. Rita's Medical Center in Lima, I have seen two other union drives in my hospital that were defeated because of management’s opposition.
This time, however, it wasn’t my employer who stopped us. It was another union.
We worked with SEIU organizers for years to win a free and fair process. It was only as a result of our hard work and the significant public backing we earned that CHP agreed to fair ground rules for an election. At the end of the day, I wanted a chance to join the union that had stood by us from the beginning. That union was SEIU.
Days before the vote we had fought so hard to secure, dozens of CNA organizers landed in our hospitals with the most vicious and misleading union-busting campaign. Of course we had to postpone the elections—not because of lack of interest among my co-workers, but because of the fear and doubts created by the CNA’s hostile anti-union propaganda.
We did not spend years fighting for the chance to make a decision based on facts and honest discourse, only to have aggressive CNA organizers storm our hospitals with dishonest and intimidating material urging us to vote no.
Only the true masters of distortion at the CNA could claim that what they did to us in Ohio—and what they are doing now to raid hospitals in California, Nevada, and other states—is somehow rescuing the nation's workers from "all employers looking to hand-pick a union." As far as I know, this isn’t exactly a big problem, and it certainly wasn’t what CHP did in Ohio.
Fortunately, most people of sound mind recognize the CNA's actions for what they really are: union-busting, pure and simple.
As for the CNA’s claims that they're building a "progressive, democratic, feminist social movement trade union"—well, all I know is that today, because of their actions, I still have
no union.
Pam Longlott, RN
St. Rita’s Medical Center
Lima, Ohio
You can submit letters to the editor by clicking on this link:
feedback@beyondchron.org or by writing to:
Beyond Chron
126 Hyde Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
415-771-9850 (phone)