Alba had a smile on her face last week when I arrived at the Los Angeles nursing home where she hustles through long, hard shifts night after night. Hard to believe she'd be in high spirits after changing the diaper of an elderly woman, but she had one thing going for her:
She hadn't yet heard about the financial shenanigans of her union president.
If you've missed the ongoing stories by The Times' Paul Pringle, you've missed some doozies.
While Alba and thousands of other workers have been schlepping bedpans for $9 or $10 an hour, Tyrone Freeman, head of the United Long-Term Care Workers local of the Service Employees International Union, has been living the high life thanks to the union dues of his struggling members.
For starters, the state's largest union local and a related charity paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to firms owned by Freeman's wife and mother-in-law. That alone was enough to raise a few eyebrows.
But then there are the other goodies dug up by Pringle -- $300,000 worth of union funds spent at a Four Seasons Resorts golf tournament, Morton's steakhouse and the celebrity-rich Beverly Hills Grand Havana Room cigar lounge, among other hot spots.
"Every expense has been in the context of fighting poverty," said Freeman, who denied any wrongdoing.
I, for one, am hoping for a public reckoning. Maybe we'll discover the secret of how to end poverty by rushing to the nearest Four Seasons for a good time.
That cigar lounge tab alone, by the way, came to nearly $10,000 and was listed on the union's financial report as a "lodging" expense. I suppose it's possible union officials smoked cigars so big they passed out on the floor. But the expense raises more than a few questions, since the Grand Havana offers no lodging.
If space allowed, I'd love to get into the $16,000 paid by the union to a minor league basketball team coached by Freeman's brother-in-law, or the claim of an $82,000 union contribution to a Florida video firm that says it never received the money.
And what's with SEIU leadership? Not only did the spending go unchecked, but national union officials were in the process of steering more locals under Freeman's control until Pringle's stories broke. Now there's an investigation into similar problems at a Michigan local headed by Freeman's former chief of staff.
