• Land Grab Main
• SEIU Deceived Voters … and Its Members
• Who Financed the "No on Prop. D" Campaign
• The $562,800 "Senior Housing Plan" for LHH's Campus
• People Affected if the West Residence Isn't Built
• Minutes of the “Assisted Lviing Project Workgroup" and the “Transition Steering Committee"
• Vote "No" on Future Bond Measures

How SEIU United Healthcare Workers Deceived Voters … And Its Members

In May 2006, SEIU United Healthcare Workers (UHW was formerly SEIU 250), mailed a hit piece to San Francisco voters hoping to stop passage of Prop. D on the June 2006 ballot.  Using fear tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook, UHW manipulated its members who work at LHH to pose for the mailer, falsely claiming Prop. D was a “secret land grab.”

A land grab was — and is — going on, but not by proponents of Prop. D.   Instead, our current Mayor, and his allies, are behind a land grab — that they’d like to keep “secret” — to use LHH’s property to help solve San Francisco’s homeless “problem.”

Last June, UHW was misleading both its own members, and San Francisco voters.  The real “land grab” going on was not sponsored by proponents of Prop. D on the June 6, 2006 ballot; quite the contrary.  The real land grab was being sponsored by Mayor Gavin “Care Not Cash” Newsom so that he could expand the City’s stock of “supportive housing” using public land on which to do so, in a concerted effort to form a so-called public–private “partnership” to get the City out of providing long-term skilled medical care to medically-indigent San Franciscans who rely on Medi-Cal.

This UHW mailer (Print and Share Flyer With Friends and Co-workers) claimed Prop. D would “evict” 300 patients “suffering from Parkinson’s, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and other diseases” in an attempt to convert “public property to private uses.”  What this mailer did not admit (to either voters, or to SEIU’s union members) was that City planners were already considering which of Laguna Honda’s current patients would not make it into the new facility, and which of them would be displaced, with or without passage of Prop. D.   SEIU UHW and SIEU 790 must have known of these alternative plans even before this hit piece was mailed to San Francisco voters, since both unions have had a “seat at the table” on multiple official planning committees conducting deliberations over the fate of Laguna Honda Hospital.

A second mailer authored by the “Save Laguna Honda Hospital No on D Committee” (FPPC ID# 1284970) under Jim Sutton’s possible control, rhetorically asked “Where will they go?  What will they do?”  As if Jim Suton cares.

Current plans to eliminate 420 skilled nursing beds if the West Residential tower is not built will displace current residents with chronic and complex medical and skilled nursing care needs.  SEIU had rhetorically asked “Where will they go?”  But SEIU is now conspicuously silent (following the June 2006 election) on where current and future residents of LHH will go if the West Residence is not built.  And they’re mysteriously silent on this issue post-election, despite having known about the potential of massive displacement of LHH’s residents for a very long time prior to the June 2006 election.  If former SEIU Executive Director Josie Mooney, or UHW’s President, Sal Roselli, tells you otherwise (that the union’s didn’t know about this before June 2006), they’ll be lying, again.

Where are the various SEIU Locals on the issue of which Laguna Honda residents will actually be displaced?  Try asking Mayor Newsom, in whose back pocket the SEIU unions are firmly entrenched, given their sense of union entitlement.

There are plans afoot to evict Laguna Honda residents who need skilled nusing care.  But the City is creatively labeling the “eviction” process as an “attrition plan.”  That’s right: Through attrition, the City will simply not re-fill skilled nursing beds at LHH with more patients who need skilled nursing care. The City will then declare (in the absence of new admissions it has prevented from happening) that the beds simply arent’t needed.

Following this scam, you should expect that the City will enlist the SEIU unions to help paint a rosy picture about Laguna Honda Hospital, expecting us to believe that complicit unions aren’t beguiling San Francisco voters and San Franciscans relying on LHH for skilled medical care.

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Copyright (c) 2006 by Committee to Save LHH.  All rights reserved.  This work may not be reposted anywhere on the Web, or reprinted in any print media, without express written permission.  E-mail the Committee to Save LHH.