Community Organizing with Barack, ACORN and SEIU: An Eyewitness Account, Part I

by Jill Stanek

Earlier this month Don Loos wrote about SEIU and ACORN’s “corporate campaigns,” thinly veiled but apparently legal extortion attempts to get big companies to unionize. Wrote Loos:

SEIU, along with its partners… stage disruptive demonstrations, place derogatory ads, hand out offensive flyers, send defamatory letters, and pressure politicians…. All of these actions are designed to irritate everyone in the community and hopefully focus the unrest on the employer, not SEIU. And, in the end, it’s all about money – union dues extracted from workers….

I saw this firsthand in 2004, somewhat from the inside.

SEIU_OBAMA

I became involved at that time with SEIU, which was trying to keep Advocate Health Care from building another Chicago area hospital in addition to the nine it already owned.

I as a pro-life activist opposed to Advocate’s expansion because it committed abortions; SEIU did because Advocate’s 25,000 employees weren’t unionized. SEIU recognized Advocate as “metropolitan Chicago’s leading private provider of health care and its third largest private employer,” according to an SEIU flyer – a very big fish. Advocate currently carries the distinction of “one of the top 10 health care systems in the United States.”

I met SEIU organizer Joseph Geevarghese at a public hearing held by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. I was picketing outside and he was packing the place with Advocate malcontents ready to hog the mic during public testimony. Soon, SEIU would be financially supporting our pro-life efforts.

According to Crain’s Chicago Business, Feb. 20, 2004:

SEIU and other unions … have launched campaigns around the country aiming to organize hospital employees.

The campaigns often use unconventional methods, such as issuing reports that call attention to a hospital’s shortcomings….

That’s exactly the strategy SEIU employed in Chicago, launching the “Hospital Accountability Project” to accuse Advocate of gouging the poor with “discriminatory pricing of health care and predatory collections policies that disproportionately impact the uninsured,” according to an SEIU flyer, and issuing a report, “Uninsured and Overcharged: How Advocate Health Care overcharges Chicago hospital patients.”

SEIU has now attempted to scrub the evidence by disabling its HAP website, www.hospitalmonitor.org, but proof of its existence can still be found here and here. And I still have some newsletters. Here’s the front cover of an SEIU HAP newsletter, Summer 2003 (click to enlarge)….

seiu newsletter front cover summer 2004.jpg

I’m no friend of Advocate, but basically SEIU charges seemed more about rhetoric than fact.  And its vehicles to shake down Advocate were ACORN and then-state Sen. Barack Obama, although I didn’t understand this at the time.

I knew a group of ‘poor’ people had protested at both Advocate Christ Hospital and the home of its CEO but didn’t know it was ACORN.

And I knew Obama was spearheading efforts to bring legislative heat down on Advocate….

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Part II: State Senator Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright enter the picture.


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Posted Oct 26th 2009 at 3:00 pm in ACORN, Big Labor, Culture, Featured Story, Obama, Politics, State Politics | 55 Comments