SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan
SACRAMENTO — A lawsuit filed by the California Primary Care Association (CPCA) and community clinics accuses a labor union representing health care workers of spending $216 million on a racketeering scheme designed to weaponize California’s initiative process to force clinics to accept labor-organizing concessions.
The federal lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of California on Sept. 18 accuses an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of engaging in a multiyear campaign of coercion against the CPCA and clinics around the state. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) and its president, Dave Regan, have repeated advanced initiatives that threaten clinics’ financial stability and used the initiatives as bargaining chips to extract labor-organizing advantages and property rights, according to the complaint.
The union offers to withdraw the initiatives only when health care entities, such as nonprofit hospitals, dialysis clinics and community clinics, agree to demands that would result in tens of thousands of health care workers becoming union members, according to the lawsuit.
“... Defendants (have) filed initiatives designed not to pass, but to subjugate and terrify,” the complaint states. “In fact, UHW has filed dozens of punitive ballot measures in California alone targeting hospitals and dialysis providers with the implied threat or directly stated purpose of coercing healthcare providers into acquiescing to their union organizing or bargaining demands.”
Proposition 44 on the Nov. 3 ballot, titled “Clinic Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, is the latest weapon the union is deploying against health care entities, according to the lawsuit.
“The measure would impose arbitrary spending ratios and requirements that no (community health clinic, or CHC) can realistically meet, subject CHCs to devastating financial penalties, threaten to lock up CHC patient board members and jeopardize access to care for millions of medically underserved patients,” the complaint says.
The CPCA specifically asserted the union has “offered to drop their harmful ballot measure – Proposition 44 – in exchange for an agreement on union election procedures at clinics, including demanding clinics provide SEIU-UHW with 25,000 new union members.”
The CPCA further alleged SEIU-UHW also “offered to withdraw the measure in exchange for CPCA reversing its opposition to a completely unrelated ballot initiative – a billionaires' wealth tax – and redirecting its own campaign funds to help pass it.”
In a statement emailed to The Record, the union called the allegations categorically false.
“This is the second time the CPCA has attempted to use legal filings to bully SEIU-UHW members into backing down from holding clinics and their CEOs accountable to the patients and communities they are supposed to serve,” the statement says. “CPCA’s first lawsuit attempting to keep Prop. 44 off the ballot was dismissed, with the judge chastising the CPCA for attempting to prevent SEIU-UHW members from using the democratic process by filing ballot measures.”
The statement quotes the judge as saying, ““Isn’t that what democracy allows them to do? You want to take that power away from the people – that is what you are asking me to do?”
UHW contends the November ballot measure addresses a real crisis arising from cuts in federal funds to the California health care system.
“... Prop. 44 holds community clinics and their executives accountable to focusing precious, dwindling resources on patient care and services that support care,” the statement says. “It will increase transparency, reduce wasteful executive spending and ensure clinic healthcare dollars go where they belong: caring for Californians in need.”
But the lawsuit argues that the defendants’ actions cannot be classified as advocacy, legitimate labor organizing or free speech.
“... It is a calculated scheme, repeatedly deployed by defendants, to weaponize California’s ballot initiative processes to extract concessions for a top-down organizing campaign that defendants could not lawfully obtain through employee-driven … procedures” driven by the federal National Labor Relations Act,” the complaint says.
The clinic-plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Centro de Salud de la Comunidad de San Ysidro in San Diego County.
"SEIU-UHW has once again engaged in illegal, ruthless tactics to leverage their dangerous ballot measure for union membership at the expense of the most underserved patients," said CPCA General Counsel JoeyCachuela, in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The union, he said, has “a long and abusive history of pushing harmful ballot measures and legislation to extort providers at great expense to the health care safety net and millions of vulnerable patients. We filed this lawsuit to put an end to this pervasive bullying once and for all.
“SEIU-UHW has shown that, historically, they will continue to attack vulnerable populations to get their demands and community clinics will not tolerate this abusive behavior any longer. Enough is enough. We will not allow bribery and intimidation to continue to interfere with patient care, full stop.”
