NUHW Ups the Ante...

From one of my KP Sources:

Folks,

I wanted to be the first to inform you that we have successfully reached 50.5%!!! We have surpassed our goal of 50% and will be filing with the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday!

There will be a national press conference at Kaiser Bellflower (in Southern California) and Kaiser Oakland (in Northern California) on Thursday afternoon (more info to follow). This is huge! 19 days ago our members began moving a petition among their co-workers to join us in NUHW and less than a month later we're going to
petition the board to schedule elections to leave SEIU. You all are amazing leaders and the work you are doing is precedent setting. Our members should be proud to have members like you, who serve them in spite of personal gain. Your leadership will work to continue reaching better standards, and increased accountability within Kaiser.

You all are the Union and clearly will be sending a message to Kaiser and SEIU that YOU are the Union, not a man 3,000 miles away in D.C. or the organizers they've sent to your facilities.

Please continue the education of our membership as we move forward to the election. We'll start to make NUHW materials i.e. buttons, flyers, shirts, pens, stickers, etc so you all can distribute them to our members. There will be thousands of materials available for folks so they can identify with the Union of choice. If you have a need for information right now, go to www.nuhw.org to get what you need. We should be telling all of our co-workers to visit the website so they can start to educate themselves!

Victory is ours!

In Unity!

Unlike CHW, which may or may not have just signed a four-year contract this past year, the UHW contract with Kaiser Permanente expires in October of 2010. So unless the Purple Plague is able to jam through some kind of magic beanstalk extension to the existing contract, SEIU will have to fight it out in each of the Kaiser facilities up and down the state. Considering that SEIU is already running approximately one organizer to every five hospitals in the north state (unknown what they are doing down south), NUHW may well have a legitimate shot at taking KP away from the Purple Plague.

That is, of course, if the National Labor Relations Board allows any vote to happen. Something gives me the feeling that Nice Scarf is busily lobbying both Obama and Hilda Solis to do something, anything, to prevent SEIU from actually having to face its UHW members in an up-or-down vote that SEIU can't legally gerrymander.