In 2009, a political disagreement over organizing and bargaining strategy between the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its second-largest healthcare local led to a costly, disastrous trusteeship in California.

Tens of millions of dollars was squandered on this bitter internal fight. Thousands of SEIU members angrily protested the removal of their elected leaders, who faced trumped-up charges and a multi-million-dollar damage suit. In response to their rights being trampled, rank-and-filers, who only wanted to democratize and reform SEIU, instead created the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), an organizational rival.

SEIU worked closely with major employers like Kaiser and Sutter to keep its dissident members in line. Talented organizers were driven out of the union, never to return; others, across the country, quit in protest.

As a result, SEIU’s reputation as a progressive union—and low-wage worker champion– was badly sullied, locally and nationally.

Dave Regan, the appointed trustee of United Healthcare Workers-West, installed seventeen years ago, now makes $400,000 a year as its president for life. He remains an embarrassment to California labor. His thuggish behavior, inside and outside SEIU, has even endangered passage of a union-backed ballot measure to tax the state’s billionaires—a good cause that his bad press is helping to defeat.

A Landrum-Griffin Flaw

Why bring up this old (labor civil) war story now? Well, the abuse of union trusteeship powers has abated quite a bit in SEIU. In the last five years, according to the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), only two of its locals have been put under trusteeship.

Meanwhile, our own union, the often more democratic Communications Workers of America (CWA), now ranks third on the AUD’s list of national unions seizing control of the most locals during the same period. Just this month, the home local of CWA national president Claude Cummings, Jr., was put under trusteeship at the request of his successor as CWA Vice-President in the southwest, Derrick Osobase.

In Houston Local 6222, the president, Belinda Aguilar, and two other principal officers got scheduled elections this fall canceled by calling for a national union takeover. They insisted this was “not for the purpose of retaliating against any member of Local 6222 or faction within the local…” Rather, they sought “temporary administration” of indefinite duration because of mounting internal “discord,” “political dysfunction,” and membership representation problems— in short, a “breakdown in governance” which occurred on their own watch!

As AUD director Josh Soffler acknowledges, there are valid reasons for taking over a troubled local. They include a need to consolidate local unions too small to be effective. This was the reason for a recent NewsGuild/CWA trusteeship over a tiny unit in Bakersfield, CA. which was then merged into our regional local of the Guild.

Teamster Trusteeships

In the 1990s, trusteeships and related removals of local officers were very necessary in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). Under IBT President Ron Carey, some Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) activists—long critical of old-guard trusteeships directed at reformers —became trustees themselves. They were given responsibility for rooting out financial corruption, stopping sweetheart deals with employers, and ending mob control of some Teamster benefit funds.

But once elected officers or executive board members in any union are ousted, their appointed replacement —a full-time national........

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