In Order to Form A More Perfect Union The Reform of the AFL-CIO Hospital and Nursing Home Council
By Anna Geronimo Hausmann
All photographs in this article © Jim Bush.
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The Delaware Avenue mansion that formerly housed the AFL-CIO Hospital and Nursing Council.
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But what has not been highlighted in the news accounts is the effect Ervolino’s twenty-year joy ride has had on the union’s seven thousand members who work in area hospitals and nursing homes, often for shamefully low wages. What has been left out of accounts of this scandal are the details of Ervolino’s exploitation of the union’s members, how he sold them out at the bargaining table and betrayed his promise to be their advocate and representative. Like children coming out of a long, abusive relationship, these workers are just now finding their voices, speaking out and standing up. SEIU 1199Upstate, the union which last year formally merged with the old Nursing Home Council, has taken on the role of therapist, facilitator, mentor, and coach, as these workers learn what it means to be truly part of a union, to fight for their dignity and rights in the workplace, and to take their place within labor’s larger struggle for social equity.
Rotten to the core
The troubles with the former Hospital and Nursing Home Council were so ingrained, so long-standing, so completely endemic to the core of the organization that it’s hard to explain just how far this organization had strayed from the idea of a union. Joe Buckley, the SEIU trustee who was charged with cleaning out the old guard, tells this illuminating tale which occurred shortly after his arrival in Buffalo. Greeting workers as they arrived for a meeting at Our Lady of Victory Hospital, Buckley introduced himself as the new trustee. One worker who misheard him replied, “You’re running for district attorney? Well, you’ve come to the right place because our union is rotten to the core.”
Some people claim that the AFL-CIO Hospital and Nursing Home Council was cleverly named to make it seem like a union, invoking the imprimatur of the mother of all unions. Whatever the motive for the name, it’s clear that the place was largely a private playground for a select few. Housed in an ornate mansion on Delaware Avenue (recently sold to, more appropriately, a law firm), it could never function as a union hall. For one thing, there was no “hall.” Marble staircase, oak paneling, crystal chandeliers, but no place for a meeting of more than a dozen or so people. It was a series of smoke-filled rooms run by Ervolino, his wife and daughter, and his first lieutenant,
William Yarmel.
Originally, the Council was created by three sponsoring unions, the SEIU, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE, known in the Buffalo area as Local 4), and the Laundry Worker’s Union. These three unions controlled the Council, and Ervolino was accountable to them. Problem was, Ervolino was president of two of the three unions, the Laundry Worker’s International Union (based in Pittsburgh) and Local 4 of the HERE. According to Marshall Blake, President of SEIU Local 1199Upstate, there were long rumors of mismanagement at the Council but in order to make any changes all three unions had to agree and that had never happened. “It wasn’t like people at SEIU weren’t wondering what was up in Buffalo,” explains Buckley, “but Ervolino was an international president and there was reluctance to step on his toes. Plus, they worked hard to keep the members quiet. It was kind of like a conspiracy of silence.” What finally changed was the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of Hotel and Restaurant Employees International. That investigation led HERE to make a deal with the Justice Department that they would clean themselves up. Justice put monitors in place in the locals and part of the agreement was complete access to all local accounts for the monitors and their investigators. For the Hospital Council, that investigator was Phil Smith of Phil Smith Investigations in Williamsville. Smith says, “When I first took on the job, Ervolino told me ‘give it your best shot, we’ve been investigated forty times and no one has found anything.’” But no one else had had access to the union’s full records. Smith worked for almost a year and gathered the facts that led to the union charges against Ervolino and to the federal charges pending. When the Justice Department monitor issued the complaint against Ervolino and that hit the press, the newly elected presidents of SEIU and HERE decided to put the Council in trusteeship. By this time, Ervolino had resigned from his presidency of Laundry Workers’ International. In October of 1997, Buckley, an SEIU division director based in Boston who has been with the union for nearly thirty years, began his trusteeship and the long process of giving the union back to the workers.
It hasn’t been easy. First of all, when Buckley stepped in there was no clear agreement to remove Yarmel and for a while management and even the union staff were confused by the situation. Buckley, who has acted as trustee many times, says “usually you clean house first, but in this case Yarmel didn’t leave for six months. Many staff didn’t really think the reform would take. They feared the old forces would come back.” Eventually, Yarmel cut a deal with the HERE monitor under which he agreed to completely disassociate from HERE and they agreed not to go after him. Reportedly, Yarmel has “flipped” and will be the chief witness against Ervolino in his upcoming federal trial.
The biggest betrayal
As Blake and Buckley tell it, there were two main difficulties in reforming the old Hospital Council. First, the place was an organizational disaster and second, it was as if thirty years of union progress had simply passed them by. According to Blake, aside from the larger fact that for more than twenty years workers had effectively had no role at all in building or running their union, there was the gargantuan task of cleaning up what Blake calls the “incredibly inept, incompetent, and possibly illegal organization.” Says Blake, “These people weren’t paying bills, they didn’t know how much money they had. The pension plan was a mess. Aside from the more notorious aspects of the case, these more mundane details demonstrate that the leaders were incompetent, lazy, and stupid.”
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Kay McClamb, Betty Pointer, Mary McCray, and Carolyn Judge, all workers at the Nazareth
Nursing Home. |
According to Blake, this incompetence directly affected the workers. “It was reflected at the bargaining table, where we discovered contracts paying barely above minimum wage and contract language that was just embarrassing.” Todd Hobler, an organizer with SEIU 1199 Upstate, echoes this legacy of incompetence. “I started here about a year and a half ago and for the first several months, I spent a good portion of my time following up on old grievances and arbitrations that the union had filed but never carried through. The old union reps considered the workers to be nuisances, just in the way.”
The terrible contracts that the former Nursing Home Council bargained are perhaps its most damaging betrayal of its members. Sure, Ervolino may have mismanaged the pension fund, he may have paid himself exorbitantly. But first and foremost, he stole from members by bargaining “sweetheart” contracts with local nursing home owners. Blake explains that in the bad old days workers had no input into the bargaining process: “All the reps were instructed never to tell the workers what went on at bargaining. That clearly disempowers them in terms of waging a struggle in the workplace.” Hobler notes that at McGuire, a local chain of nursing homes, the union rep would bargain a contract with a committee selected by the union. “The committee would negotiate a deal and then come out and say ‘here, vote on it.’ They would bargain for pay retroactive to when the contract had expired and tell the members ‘if you don’t approve it, you’ll lose the retro pay.’ After it was voted down, they would tell management, ‘we’ll vote again in two weeks.’ They would make the workers vote again and again on the same contract, until finally, with $150 or $200 dollars in retro pay at stake, the members would vote yes.” In one notorious instance, the union made the workers at Garden Gate, a McGuire home, vote five times on the same contract, finally resorting to a mail-in ballot in order to get a yes vote. The wages for certified nurse aides at McGuire when SEIU took over, by the way, were $5.50 per hour. Kay McClamb, a union member who has worked at Nazareth Nursing Home in Buffalo for twenty-eight years, says that in the old days only the union rep could speak at the bargaining table. McClamb remembers that when the workers talked about striking they were told that they would absolutely not have the support of the union if they walked. In fact, Hobler notes that over the years the union used the threat of strike not against the management but against the union members, telling them if they refused to approve a negotiated settlement they’d have no choice but to walk. “They used the threat of losing their pay checks to keep the members in line,” says Hobler.
Reform and rebirth
But now the members of the former Nursing Home Council are members of SEIU 1199Upstate, a union representing roughly 14,000 workers at 50 nursing homes and 22 hospitals from Utica to Buffalo and from Watertown to Jamestown. The new union sees its main job as helping workers to stand up after keeping them down for so long. “After so many years of telling the members, ‘you should take this,’ now we’re saying, ‘if it’s worth it to you, you should struggle and we’ll stand with you,’” says Hobler. Jim Crampton, also an organizer with 1199Upstate, adds that raising workers’ expectation has been difficult. “I’ve been with SEIU for 13 years,” he notes, “organizing in some pretty difficult and depressed areas but what the workers expect from a struggle here is so much lower than anywhere else I’ve been. People here have felt defeated.” Crampton points to the example of Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center. “Two years ago,” he explains, “those workers were facing the prospect of their hospital closing. When we came in, they were afraid to ask for anything for fear the place would go under. But we’ve won wage and benefit increases and job security. Before, there wasn’t any ‘us and them,’ workers felt totally responsible for their facility. Now they are gaining the strength to stand up for themselves.”
Watching and helping these workers to find their voices and their strength has been especially gratifying to Hobler and Crampton, considering how long these workers were betrayed by their own union leaders. “It’s not easy to turn around twenty-five years of union mismanagement,” notes Hobler. “We have quite a few folks who have been browbeaten by both the union and their bosses for years. It’s quite a change for them to be told ‘you can stand up and make a difference and we’ll be there for you’.” That said, Hobler is quick to add that the union hasn’t quite turned the corner. “We’re a work in progress,” he says. “The corruption is gone, but what remains is a lot of cynicism and not a lot of hope or inspiration. The new culture hasn’t taken root as firmly as we’d like it to, but we’re working on it.”
Blake explains that the most important part of combating that cynicism is communication with members, throughout the bargaining process and on a daily basis. Michael Shanahan, a unit clerk at St. Francis Home in Williamsville and a chief steward and member of the union’s executive board, echoes this. “The main difference is that the place is accessible and the staff is accessible,” he says.
Along with better and more open communication, Blake feels the union needs to be much more aggressive at the bargaining table. “And we’re going to back that up in the workplace with rallies, picketing, wearing buttons,” he says. “In the shop, we’ve begun to show that this is a different place.” McClamb says that before SEIU “we (nursing home workers) never got together to discuss things and help each other. But I got to go to the national SEIU convention last year and it was just amazing.” Shanahan agrees: “Going to the convention was so uplifting. I spent all my time talking to other stewards and members about their successes and I feel I brought some of that energy back to our home. The workers in our union are just so much more empowered and involved. We’ve had lots of picketing, a strike vote at Nazareth. We’re not afraid to stand up anymore. We never had the strength to threaten to strike before.”
Turkeys and booze
In the shop it is a decidedly different place, and, not surprisingly, some managers aren’t too happy. “The boss’ response has been interesting,” Hobler deadpans. Actually, it has run the gamut from open hostility to paternalism. Crampton quotes the supervisor at Baker-Victory Services who, complaining during a labor-management meeting, angrily asked “Why did you come here and stir up all these girls?” Hobler adds “There’s a lot of anger in the nursing homes and when we came in and told the workers it’s okay to stand up and fight, understandably the bosses weren’t too thrilled. Some administrators have become openly hostile to the union for pushing employees to demand a voice on the job. Some were dismissive and even ignored us when we filed grievances and arbitrations— they’d refuse to attend grievance meetings. But we won some labor board charges and some arbitrations and now I think some administrators have a new respect for the union.”
Blake is unapologetic towards management’s difficulties with the new union. “You know,” he says, “ in the old days, the bosses used to send turkeys and booze to Ervolino for the holidays. They got the message that we’re not interested in that. They’re feeling like they had this great deal and now they don’t anymore. The nursing home industry has been underpaying its workers for a long time. Now they think we’re pounding on them and we say, ‘tough, get ready for some more pounding.’” Blake does concede that he feels some local health care administrators are relieved to be dealing with a fair and honest union that genuinely cares about its members. He singles out Kaleida and Niagara Falls Memorial Hospital as systems that “see the union as an ally in moving legislation” and Hobler cites the Catholic Health System as somewhat more accepting of the union’s role in lifting up its workers.
Frank Ervolino and his wife, Anna Mae, are co-defendants in the upcoming federal trial. Here is a summary of the charges they face and the specific allegations of what they committed against the union:
In the twenty-nine page complaint, prosecutors charge the Ervolinos with eight separate counts of embezzlement and conspiracy to commit theft. Among the charges are:
• that they embezzled funds from the Hospital Council and from its pension fund, both on their own and “conspiring with others;”
• that they gave themselves “excessive compensation without authorization,” both in salaries and in pension;
• that they committed “conspiracy to theft of labor union assets” through payment of severance pay to themselves;
• that they embezzled from the Council through payments to annuity funds and payments on life insurance premiums;
• that Anna Mae Ervolino converted to her own use more than $50,000.
The amount of excessive compensation received by the Ervolinos is laid out in a chart in the complaint which maps the union’s assets and the Ervolino’s compensation from 1990 through 1996. In those seven years, the net assets of the Hospital Council declined by nearly $400,000. Over that period, Frank Ervolino averaged roughly $120,000 per year in salary. His wife, Anna Mae, averaged around $70,000 per year. That’s nearly $200,000 per year in salaries for the two of them, representing workers making on average $9 per hour.
Dealing in a new health care environment
Unionism in today’s globalized, high-tech, entrepreneurial economy means organizing regionally. According to Blake, in today’s economy, especially in health care, it’s all about regionalizing and capacity. The rash of hospital mergers and the growth of huge, multi-state chains of nursing homes makes it very hard to operate as a small local; you end up competing with yourself against workers you represent at a home a few miles away. Reorganizing on a regional basis means you can build capacity. With capacity you can organize—there’s more dues money to support an organizing department, for example—and you gain political clout, the ability to get legislation passed. Hobler notes the example of nursing home workers in Connecticut in SEIU Local 1199North East who have lined up all their contracts to expire on the same day. They might be bargaining with individual nursing home owners, but their real target is the state and getting them to Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements. Last spring, they threatened to strike and at the last minute the governor “found” an extra $200 million dollars for reimbursements. “And they only represent 20% of nursing home workers,” Hobler says. “In New York State we represent 50% of nursing home workers. Imagine what we could accomplish; the potential here is amazing.” And getting closer to being realized: on April 1, 2002 three hundred nursing home contracts in New York State will expire.
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The Delaware Avenue mansion that formerly housed the AFL-CIO Hospital and Nursing Council.
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Today’s unionism also means building coalitions with consumers and, in some cases, businesses to enact legislation. SEIU 1199Upstate has worked closely with the Nursing Home Community Coalition of New York State, an advocacy group for nursing home residents and their families. Cynthia Rudder, director of the Coalition, says that several SEIU locals in the state have collaborated with her group to work on passing legislation to improve the standard of care in nursing homes. “Our philosophy has been that we can’t improve care in nursing homes unless the residents, relatives, and workers are all working together. We know that staffing issues are integral to many of the care issues and we also know that you can’t solve staffing issues without the input of the workers.”
Respect in the community
Finally, unionism today means working with not-for-profit organizations, churches, even arts organizations, to bring dignity to workers’ lives and to take their place in the larger fight for social and economic justice. Crampton points to the union’s “Bread and Roses” program which, in cooperation with CEPA Gallery and along with other local unions, will feature photographs of the union’s members on the outside of Metro buses. “It puts a face on the union,” Crampton explains, “it humanizes and dignifies the important work we do.” This, according to Joe Buckley, is perhaps the union’s biggest and most important challenge. “The Ervolinos’ worst legacy is that they weakened the union,” explains Buckley. “They weakened it by draining its resources, but they also weakened it by keeping the workers down. They didn’t want their workers to fight or stand up for themselves. The only work they did was to keep a lid on the workers, to keep them quiet.” SEIU sees its main job as undoing this legacy and bringing its members into the larger circle of labor’s fight for workplace safety, equity, and dignity. Todd Hobler notes that workers are happy to have the union work for them now, but in the near future he sees the workers taking on this work themselves. “We have a new organizing department, we’ve hired a political director to coordinate political and legislative efforts, we’ve launched a voter registration campaign and have a political organizer in each shop,” he says. In addition, he notes, they hope to hire an educational director to train stewards to handle most day-to-day issues in each shop. “We’ll help them develop the skills and confidence necessary to handle grievances and issues that arise. That’s what it means to give the union back to the members.” Marshall Blake agrees: “We’re not there yet, by any means; we’ve got a long way to go. But three years from now, we’ll have a militant organization ready to be mobilized.” You can forget the booze and turkeys, this union wants respect.
Anna Hausmann has worked for area unions, including Hospital and Nursing Home Council. Currently, she is a writer living in Buffalo.
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