SF Weekly: Nursing Home Lobbyist Quits After He Predicts SEIU Powerplay

From SFweekly.com:

On Wednesday, March 19, at 8:52 p.m., Scott Carlson, executive director of California Alliance to Advance Nursing Home Care, was apparently in an optimistic mood.

Carlson is a former executive with the Arkansas–based nursing home chain Beverly Enterprises. And until last week he ran the Alliance, a lobbying organization that helped negotiate labor contracts that have discouraged nursing home workers from informing the press, or regulators, about poor conditions for patients.

This was achieved through a pact between nursing home chains and the two-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation's largest union, which represents nurses, orderlies, and other healthcare employees. Under the pact, the union would use its clout with California Democrats to push nursing-home-industry goals such as tort reform, which would limit patients and their families' right to sue in cases of wrongful death or injury; in exchange, the chains selected facilities where the SEIU could absorb workers into union ranks. This was part of national SEIU leader Andy Stern's strategy of collaboration rather than confrontation, and included deals in Washington state, Missouri, and California designed to rapidly add to union ranks on terms attractive to employers.

But in Sept. 2005, the strategy stalled when Sal Rosselli, the leader of the SEIU's California healthcare affiliate, denounced the collaboration on moral grounds. He particularly objected to the union's failed attempt to push California legislation that would have limited patient lawsuits against nursing homes. This was "neither good policy nor politically winnable," the president of United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW-West) wrote in a memo to SEIU's Washington headquarters. "We cannot sacrifice principles such as adequate consumer protection for organizing rights."