Labor’s Civil War in California: The NUHW Healthcare Workers’ Rebellion (review)

In the past three decades North American workers and their unions have increasingly come under attack from neo-liberal governments that serve corporate interests. With the recent economic crisis these attacks have intensified, as highly paid unionized workers in the private and public sector have been blamed for corporate bailouts and municipal budget shortfalls. Rarely do these attacks come from within unions. In Labor’s Civil War in California: ThenuhwHealthcare Workers’ Rebellion historian Cal Winslow recounts such a story – the tragic destruction of United Healthcare Workers-West (uhw) by the Service Employees International Union (seiu) and the struggle to rebuild the union as the National Union of Healthcare Workers (nuhw). Throughout the narrative Winslow challenges the reader to question the way forward: corporate unionism or social justice unionism? Organizing from the top-down or the bottom-up? Which approach will help rebuild the labour movement workers so desperately need? And which side are you on?

As seiu’s third largest affiliate and California’s second largest seiu local, Winslow describes uhw as “the most powerful labor organization in the state” in 2007. (22) By trade union standards uhw was democratic and “prided itself on workplace organization and member involvement.” (25) uhw was deeply rooted in Northern California where in 1938 it became the first hospital union in the United States, the result of an organizing drive led by hospital porters at San Francisco’s General Hospital, a drive Winslow explains as organized “from the bottom up.” uhw was considered progressive in its opposition to the war in Iraq and its support of social justice issues, such as universal health-care, same-sex marriage, and its aid to striking unite-here workers in 2004– 2006. In an industry Winslow describes as being dominated by anti-union corporations, uhw hospital members (mostly women, people of colour and immigrants) received full healthcare, defined pension plans, and employment and income security, as well as the highest wages in the healthcare industry in 2008. With nearly 150,000 members, uhw was the fastest growing local within the seiu, no doubt due in part to its successful strikes and willingness to place “organizing rights for the unorganized” and the right of care-givers to have a voice in hospital staffing matters on the bargaining table. Thus it is not surprising that uhw contracts, especially those with Kaiser Permanente, were “referred to as the ‘gold standard,’ the best acute-care agreements in the United States” (24–25) and that uhw was highly regarded as a “model” union. “Wrecking uhw,” Winslow argues, “would be no cake-walk.” (24) But why would seiu want to “wreck” its most powerful and successful local, a union that had nearly doubled in size in less than eight years and at a time when trade union membership in the US private sector had fallen to around 7.6 per cent? (13)

Winslow offers several explanations, but only two issues have substance. seiu charged that the uhw was guilty of “financial malfeasance” when it established a $6 million healthcare education fund for the purpose of campaigning on healthcare issues. Though uhw disbanded the fund when seiu feared the entity might become a “union within the union,” the charge later became the basis for placing uhw in trusteeship, but it was a charge difficult to prove. A district court judge found nothing amiss and dismissed all charges. More complex, however, was the charge that uhw was “obstructing the forced transfer of 65,000 long-term care workers” to Local 6434 in Southern California. (27) While the transfer of these workers seemed to be a fairly straightforward “organizational issue,” Winslow contends that uhw was in violation of seiu president Andy Stern’s “top-down” corporate approach to unionism.

At the heart of this battle was unwillingness, on uhw’s behalf, to abandon decades of struggle and the vision of building the union “from the bottom up,” in favour of seiu’s Alliance agreement – “an agreement on the part...