Tasty has done a 2009 top-ten countdown of SEIU bloopers, and I can't really put anything more to the list than what Tasty has done. Part one, bloopers 10 through 6, can be seen here, while part two, bloopers 5 through 1, can be seen here.
There's very little I can add to the list, save for the image of the UHW Chicken appearing at the San Francisco FUD fundraiser, followed the next day with the egg-tossing attacks by SEIU members down at the Los Angeles fundraiser, including nailing the VP of the United Teachers of Los Angeles with a long-distance egg-o-gram. It took what was seen largely as an "inside fight" within a union and gave SEIU an image of a bully which cannot brook dissent in any manner or shape or form.
All in all, 2009 has been a very bad year for SEIU in general, and SEIU-UHW in particular. Andy's army came into 2009 with practically unlimited access to the levers of power in Washington and in the Lamestream Media, and promptly began to piss it away - because "practically unlimited" evidently just wasn't enough for Our Glorious Maximum Leader. Beginning with the ghost-write of the Marshall Hearings findings (thus giving him the ostensible excuse to place UHW into trusteeship), selling out to Rose Ann DeMoro and CNA, and then injecting SEIU into the UNITE/HERE breakup, and now with the breakup of Change To Win and several unions leaving CTW and returning to AFL-CIO - all of these have contributed largely to the tarnishing of Stern's image, as well as that of SEIU.
On the ground here in Hotel California, it seems that Brave Sir Regan's pledge to drive a stake into the heart of NUHW hasn't quite come to pass. In head-to-head election competition, where SEIU defeated NUHW it did so by close margins (Fresno IHSS, Hawkins), but where NUHW has defeated SEIU it has done so by decisive margins (Doctors, Santa Rosa Memorial), occasionally even forcing SEIU to retreat from the field (Los Alamitos) or try to hide the outcome of the vote (Providence Tarzana).
Going forward into 2010, it will be interesting to see just how bad the financial picture is at UHW. I know that the UHW COPE contributions have plummeted, and I'm thinking that their dues revenue has taken a hit as well, as scads of UHW-covered rank-and-file employees have changed their status from having automatic deduction to paying monthly - if at all. Add that to the fact that UHW has not organized one new hospital in all of 2009, it's going to be interesting to see if UHW will even try to paper over their revenue issues on this year's upcoming LM-2 reports.
In the meantime, it appears that the beat will go on for NUHW, with elections coming up this week at KaiPerm in SoCal as well as others opening up as the NLRB finally figures out that SEIU's delaying actions are largely just that.
Happy New Year, all...
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BWAHAHAHHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAH Happy New Year Andy! Bwahahahhahahhahahahaha
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year to you! Thanks for all your work this past year. I can't count the number of times you've made me laugh when things were difficult! Even now all I need to do is re-play the "Little Pink Scarf" clip and I'm humming all day. That's number one in my top ten greats for the year. That and whoever came up with using the word "Zombies" to describe post-trusteeship UHW. That was perfect. You bloggers have been huge morale boosters during this critical first year.
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