The healthcare union says that the charges are frivolous. It has successfully petitioned for three elections outside the labor board's jurisdiction.
Alleging improprieties, the SEIU had sought through the state to block the first vote, to represent employees at a San Pablo hospital, then lost in a rout: 158 to 24. In a second, much-larger election -- for 10,000 home-care workers in the Fresno area -- the SEIU did not ask state officials to halt the balloting. It deployed about 900 people to campaign and won narrowly, 2,938 to 2,705. The new union says it is challenging the Fresno result.
The third election is underway by mail.
Heading the healthcare union are former SEIU officers ousted after their Oakland-based local was removed from their control and placed in the hands of trustees early this year.
The Oakland officers broke with SEIU's leadership after accusing them of weakening the union through forced mergers of locals and sweetheart deals with employers. The SEIU called those complaints a smoke screen, saying the dissidents had resisted a program to modernize the union to position it for growth.
One of the SEIU's allegations in the petitions dispute has raised eyebrows in labor and Democratic Party circles. The SEIU contends that the new union is "dominated by employers," and thus illegal, because former Bay Area political consultant Clint Reilly, who employs janitors as a commercial landlord, had helped its organizers raise money before they formed the group.
He "is trying to destroy our union," said Dave Regan, an SEIU executive vice president.
Reilly, who once ran for San Francisco mayor and has a decades-long record as a pro-labor Democrat, said he has worked alongside the SEIU in the past. He has managed political campaigns for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both of California. During the 2008 presidential election, Reilly said, he hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton in a building that he also made available to the new union's leaders, who at the time were still in the SEIU.
He said the janitors are SEIU members. But the accusation that his status as an employer has tainted the new union is bogus, he said, particularly because he is not in the healthcare field.
"Why the NLRB is even pursuing this as a serious claim is beyond me," Reilly said.
