Zombies catch election fever

A little background to explain why the Zombies are all of a sudden struck with election fever.

Post-trusteeship, the former leaders of UHW formed NUHW and quickly got down to the task of orchestrating the members gathering signatures for decertification of the newly Zombie-fied UHW. The Zombies naturally filed blocking charges to slow down, frustrate and hold their members hostage indefinitely. It appears that Zombies took stock of what they had to deal with (an underdog union supported by devoted UHW members dying to get out of the Zombies deathgrip, more than 100 community and political leaders supporting a fair and free from intimidation election, and losing 7 out of 9 elections in 2009) and reasoned that if they are going to win an election this year they had better focus their efforts on facilities where NUHW support is weaker, hence their appeal to the NLRB. NUHW viewed this as the Zombies trying to manipulate election scheduling, which ought to be handled by the NLRB with no bias for any party, be it union or employer, and tried to appeal to the NLRB's sense of reason. Unfortunately this request was not honored and the Zombies view NUHW's actions as being anti-member. Lame for sure.

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Shown below is the Zombies attempt to prove substantial member backing for their desperate plea in getting NUHW to back off decert elections.  The astute reader will notice a none-too-clever attempt by the Zombies to increase the number of signatures.

A quick glance at the signatures in the right hand column shows that the first 5 listed are the same as the last 5! C'mon Zombies at least move the signatures around a little bit and make me work a bit for these blog
-entries...you make it too easy! I guess the proofreader was at lunch when this gem was pushed out via the UHW Report. Tasty over at Stern Burger with Fries, notes that this leaves 52 unique signatures. I wonder about the authenticity of these unique signatures since I am not able to match signatures to faces of people I know. Given the Zombies propensity for deceit it seems reasonable that some of these signatures could be forgeries.

So 52 signatures at 51 facilities...does this mean that there is one signature for 50 facilities and a staggering 2 for the remaining facility? Or did the Zombie(s) charged with collecting these signatures get smart and visit just a few facilities to round up a bunch of signatures? Either way the Zombies are desperate to publicize the names of their few supporters, no matter how pathetic that support looks. How pathetic could their support be? Heh heh heh, read on.

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The Zombies, being a shifty group of sellouts, scabs and fighters fond of backhanding actually make things a whole lot worse for themselves by issuing a press release about most of the facilities where elections are soon to be scheduled.

When one compares the list of facilities shown in the open letter to those shown in the press release a number of discrepancies appear. First off are the facilities that appeared in the open letter but are not shown in the press release:

• Brookside Skilled Nursing Hospital
• Emerald Gardens Nursing Center
• Gilroy Healthcare and Rehab Center
• Golden Living Center - Fresno
• Grant Cuesta Sub-Acute and Rehab Center
• Heritage Care Center
• Home for Jewish Parents
• McClure Convalescent
• Northgate Care Center
• Palo Alto Nursing Center
• St. Francis Convalescent Pavilion
• St. Francis Heights Convalescent Hospital
• Valley Point Nursing Center
• Willow Tree Nursing Center

Is this an oversight or more likely a realization that these 14 facilities are still very much pro NUHW?

Second are the facilities they've added:

• Centinela Hospital Medical Center (Inglewood)
• Clovis Convalescent Hospital
• Creekside Care Center (Heritage) (Stockton)
• Enloe Medical Center (Crothall)
• In-Home Supportive Services Consortium (San Francisco)
• O'Connor Hospital (San Jose)
• Prison Health Services (Dublin)
• Saint Louise Regional Hospital (Gilroy)
• St. Francis Medical Center (Lynwood)
• Sutter Delta Medical Center (Antioch)
• Sutter Eden Medical Center (Castro Valley)
• Sutter Solano Medical Center (Vallejo)
• Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center (Hayward)

They have picked up 13 facilities totaling 4,080 members. Looks good for the Zombies, right? Well I have 3 things for you to keep in mind:

1. in the press release, the number of members shown after each facility doesn't indicate support for the Zombies; it's merely a count of the number of workers eligible to vote,
2. in the open letter, the number of workers at the 14 facilities listed above don't show their member count so a net loss or gain in voters is impossible to determine, and
3. net loss for facilities: 1

When one considers the open letter and the press release a startling fact can be derived: of the 6715 voting member, just 52 signed the open letter. That's just 0.77% -- less than one percent and folks, that's messed up. Zombies: if members are truly happy with your dismal representation, where's the support to back it up? There is virtually no member support for staying with the Zombies, period. At Memorial you lost badly: 21 NUHW votes for each SEIU vote. How badly do you think you are going to go down in this dress rehearsal for the Kaiser election this June? Tasty was right: math is hard!