Kaiser charged with criminal breach of federal labor law
Monday, August 23, 2010 at 7:00AM Management caught paying for staff to campaign for SEIU in government-supervised union election for 44,000 employees
Oakland, Calif.—Nine healthcare workers have filed a federal lawsuit against their employer, Kaiser Permanente, for allegedly providing criminal financial support to SEIU. SEIU is the union that Kaiser employees seek to replace in an upcoming election supervised by the federal government.
Under federal law, employers like Kaiser are prohibited from providing financial support to the unions that represent their employees, in order to ensure that unions act in the interest of their members and not on behalf of the employer. Violating this law is a criminal offense.
Kaiser employees’ lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Kaiser violated the Labor Management Relations Act by paying for dozens of Kaiser employees to conduct full-time election campaigning on behalf of SEIU.



