Service Employees International Union

They led the most powerful forces in healthcare -- the trade groups representing doctors, insurance companies, hospitals and drug makers. Any one of them could stall, if not derail, President Obama's hopes of overhauling the U.S. healthcare system. Instead, they stood with Obama before TV cameras at the White House and pledged their cooperation. For Obama, the show of unity gave momentum to perhaps his most ambitious domestic goal.

Workers at a hospital and two nursing homes in Hollister, Calif., have voted to remain in the Service Employees International Union rather than join a rival group launched by former officers of the giant labor organization. The election was the latest skirmish between the SEIU and the upstart National Union of Healthcare Workers, which has filed election petitions to represent nearly 100,000 employees in California.

For years, the powerful Service Employees International Union has played a lead role in the campaign for a landmark federal law that would allow workers to join a labor organization simply by signing petitions. Now, as part of a high-stakes battle in California, the union is urging federal officials to throw out petitions signed by tens of thousands of its own members who have asked to be represented by a rival upstart group. The David-vs.

The Obama administration said Monday that it has made no decision about whether to rescind $6.8 billion in stimulus money allotted to California in a dispute over the legality of a wage cut for home healthcare workers who belong to a politically powerful union. The announcement is at odds with what state officials said they had explicitly been told. Gov.

Officials in the governor's office say a politically powerful union may have had inappropriate influence over the Obama administration's decision to withhold billions of dollars in federal stimulus money from California if the state does not reverse a scheduled wage cut for the labor group's workers.

The union of low-wage caregivers that Tyrone Freeman once headed has taken him to court to demand restitution of more than $1.1 million -- dues money that allegedly financed his lifestyle of $175 glasses of cognac, $250 bottles of wine and a $3,400 trip to the NFL's Pro Bowl in Hawaii.

California's largest state employees union overwhelmingly approved a contract Saturday that limits some of the emergency measures imposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to bridge the state's $42-billion budget gap. The contract won approval from 91% of the 95,000 state employees represented by Service Employees International Union, officials said. The union's members make up about half of the state's workers. The contract negotiated last month eliminates one of the two monthly furlough days Schwarzenegger imposed to help bridge the state's multibillion-dollar deficit.

A new Oakland-based union -- the product of a brutal fight between the elected leaders of healthcare workers in Northern California and their superiors in Washington -- announced Tuesday that it had gained its first members. North American Healthcare agreed to recognize the National Union of Healthcare Workers as the representative of more than 350 nursing home workers at four of the company's facilities in Northern California, the union said.

Representatives of laundry and garment workers said they would vote today on whether to withdraw from their union, Unite Here, with an eye toward establishing formal ties with the Service Employees International Union. But Unite Here's majority leadership said the union's constitution prohibits affiliates from deciding on their own to secede.