When the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) defeated the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) in balloting among 43,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente (KP) last October, SEIU Executive Vice President Dave Regan was exultant.  SEIU’s victory was “a huge achievement,” he said. “NUHW is now, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  We’re thrilled.”

On a conference call with union staffers and SEIU supporters at Kaiser earlier this week, Regan sounded a lot less thrilled.  And for good reason.  On Monday, July 18, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing officer found that evidence of election misconduct by SEIU and Kaiser — presented by NUHW — was very relevant to her determination of whether the largest NLRB vote in seventy years should be overturned.

Kaiser subsequently punished those 2,300 nurses and other professional employees for switching unions by withholding scheduled raises and other benefits.  As reported in my new book about “labor’s civil wars” at Kaiser and elsewhere, the giant HMO violated the National Labor Relations Act in such egregious fashion that the NLRB sought a rare “10(j) injunction” to enforce the NLRA.  The resulting federal court order compelled management to provide $2 million in back pay and interest to the affected workers, who remain locked in difficult negotiations on their first NUHW contract with Kaiser. In a strongly-worded thirty-four-page rebuke, federal Administrative Law Judge Lana H. Parke ruled that collusion between Kaiser and its largest union so “interfered with the employees’ exercise of a free and reasoned choice” that a new election must be held.  In particular, Parke cited the impact of management unfair labor practices in several smaller Kaiser bargaining units where workers voted to leave SEIU and join NUHW prior to the September–October 2010 election in a statewide unit of service and technical employees.