Fresno workers spoke out about SEIU’s tactics during the controversial election in June.

Today’s Wall Street Journal and Fresno Bee report that SEIU engaged in illegal threats, ballot-tampering, and other serious violations of election rules during a June union election for 10,000 homecare providers in Fresno, according to voters and union staff who worked for SEIU during the election and have now come forward.

A sworn declaration from an SEIU whistleblower says that senior SEIU officials instructed organizers to violate election rules during the mail-in, secret-ballot vote, and then destroyed evidence of the violations. Statements from two former SEIU staff and several homecare providers were recently submitted to the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) as evidence accompanying a request to overturn the election results.

Among the illegal tactics reported:

• SEIU staff tampered with workers’ ballots, by voiding the ballots of workers who marked their ballot for NUHW, and by collecting ballots directly from workers’ mailboxes.
• Senior SEIU officials instructed staff to handle ballots in violation of election rule, and advised staff on how to do so in a way that was legally deniable.
• SEIU organizers threatened Latino caregivers that SEIU would “call immigration” and have them deported in retaliation unless they voted for SEIU.
• SEIU officials instructed staff to threaten and lie to voters that they would lose their  wages, their health insurance, and even their jobs unless they voted for SEIU.

Click here to read a brief summary of the charges, accompanied by the entire 59-page submission to PERB.

SEIU officials also instructed organizers to lie to homecare providers by telling them to “stay united” with Kaiser workers in local union SEIU-UHW—while SEIU-UHW Trustee Eliseo Medina had already admitted that they intended to force all homecare members out of SEIU-UHW and into a local union with a history of corruption where they would be divided from Kaiser and hospital workers.

These illegal tactics allowed SEIU to hang on by a razor-thin margin when a majority of workers clearly wanted to quit SEIU and stay united with hospital and Kaiser workers who are joining NUHW. The Fresno election came just after NUHW’s 6-to-1 victory in the first election against SEIU, and SEIU officials resorted to desperate and illegal tactics to avoid another defeat.

Please SIGN OUR PETITION demanding an investigation into the Fresno election.