The New York Times, January 18, 2009, Sunday

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The New York Times

January 18, 2009, Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final

HEADLINE: An Internal Union Dispute Turns Nasty, With a Local in the Balance

BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

BODY:

As president of a union local representing 150,000 health care workers in California, Sal Rosselli knows how to get under management's skin, setting up picket lines at hospitals, ridiculing company executives in advertisements and sometimes even protesting outside their homes.

But now Mr. Rosselli is using his street-fighting savvy to battle the head of his own union, Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, who is widely considered the most powerful labor leader in the nation.

The feud has grown so nasty that many members of Mr. Rosselli's local, United Healthcare Workers-West, based in Oakland, petitioned this month for a vote to secede from the national union. The local's board decided on Friday to schedule such a vote this March. These moves came in response to Mr. Stern's efforts to oust Mr. Rosselli, remove 65,000 workers from his local and place it in trusteeship. The parent union has accused Mr. Rosselli of financial malpractice and fraud.

''Liar,'' says Mr. Rosselli, who regularly denounces Mr. Stern as a top-down leader who retaliates against leaders who disagree with him.

''Hypocrite,'' Mr. Stern responds.

The parent union has accused Mr. Rosselli of diverting $3 million into a political slush fund to protect himself against trusteeship and the chopping up of his local. Mr. Rosselli argues that it was an education fund for health care reform, and his backers say that the fund was legal, that only $100,000 was spent and that its goals were legitimate.

''This is a civil war,'' said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Rosselli supporter.

''The cost of a trusteeship will be great,'' Mr. Lichtenstein said. ''To my mind, it will mean the destruction of a very dynamic, progressive union that is the model for which most of American labor should aspire.''

Ray Marshall, a former labor secretary, has been appointed the hearing officer in the dispute and is expected to rule this week on whether Mr. Rosselli, who was re-elected to a three-year term on Tuesday, should be ousted and his local placed into trusteeship.

Mr. Stern's union is the nation's fastest-growing labor group, with 1.8 million members, and many labor leaders and their Democratic allies are alarmed by the feud, saying it is hurting the union at a pivotal time. This month, the union began a $30 million campaign to press President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to enact universal health coverage and pass a law making it easier to unionize.

Mr. Rosselli and his local are an influential force. They have created a giant political action committee, helped forge an unusual labor-management partnership with Kaiser Permanente, and helped block Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan for universal health coverage, arguing that it was too watered down.

In many ways, Mr. Stern and Mr. Rosselli are similar. Both are fierce fighters, and both are experts at building loyalty and mobilizing the rank and file.

Their fight escalated last spring when Mr. Stern proposed removing 65,000 nursing home and home-care workers from Mr. Rosselli's local and uniting them with workers from two other locals to create a giant local of 240,000 long-term workers. The new union was to be headed by Tyrone Freeman, president of a Los Angeles local.

Mr. Rosselli denounced the move as an effort at retaliation.

''We achieved the highest standards for nursing home workers in the country because they were in the same union as hospital workers,'' Mr. Rosselli said. ''Putting these workers in a separate long-term union would relegate them to permanent second-class status.''

Mr. Rosselli was angry that Mr. Stern seemed to be rewarding Mr. Freeman, a Stern ally who he said had negotiated worse wages for nursing home workers.

Mr. Rosselli was able to derail part of that plan when his allies dug up information that Mr. Freeman had spent $10,000 in union money at a cigar lounge and hundreds of thousands of dollars more for his mother's day care agency and his wife's video company. Those revelations led to Mr. Freeman's ouster.

Not long ago, Mr. Rosselli was a Stern ally who backed Mr. Stern's plan to increase dues to finance far more organizing. Mr. Rosselli said tensions began when he became convinced that the parent union had bypassed him and his members in some negotiations and when he soured on a nursing home contract that he had previously supported. That contract -- many of its details had been kept secret from members -- traded away some potential gains for current members; in exchange, management agreed not to oppose unionization efforts at dozens of nursing homes.

Nowadays Mr. Rosselli loudly denounces that deal and Mr. Stern. ''To achieve his goal of top-down sweetheart deals with the nursing home industry, he wants to take us out of representing nursing home workers because we won't stop objecting,'' Mr. Rosselli said.

Mr. Stern defended the union's negotiating strategy, saying, ''We've always believed our job was to use all of our strength to raise everyone up, and not just a few.''

Mr. Stern said that creating a giant California local of nursing home and home-care workers was approved by the parent union's board and was consistent with overall policy: to form larger locals that have greater bargaining and political power. He said the move resembled a 2005 merger that benefited Mr. Rosselli, when a health care local in Southern California merged with his old local, with Mr. Rosselli heading the combined local.

''I would say the idea that this is retaliation for him speaking up defies history and reeks of hypocrisy,'' Mr. Stern said. ''This is about members' interest, not leaders' interest.''

One reason for the move to create the larger local, Mr. Stern said, was that Mr. Rosselli's local had not done nearly enough organizing of nursing home workers. Mr. Rosselli vehemently disagreed, pointing out that he recently signed contracts that gave a green light to organizing 65 nursing homes.

Richard Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University, said the bigger bulldog -- Mr. Stern -- was likely to prevail.

''You have someone who is arguably the most successful national labor leader who has a done a lot of internal restructuring that has worked by and large,'' he said. ''I don't see him bowing down or backing down because a strong local labor leader wants another approach.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

CORRECTION-DATE: January 20, 2009

CORRECTION:

An article on Sunday about a dispute within the Service Employees International Union omitted one source of information involving accusations that Tyrone Freeman, president of a Los Angeles local, spent union money improperly. While some of the information was unearthed by allies of a rival, Sal Rosselli, president of United Healthcare Workers West, some of it was also uncovered by The Los Angeles Times in its reporting during the past six months. The article also referred incorrectly to the relative of Mr. Freeman whose day care agency received union money. It was his mother-in-law, not his mother.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Sal Rosselli, head of a 150,000-member union local in California, was re-elected last week but might be ousted from the post.(PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

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