Militant Health Care Union Leader Sal Rosselli Retires

I get a kick watching Sal Rosselli at Labor Notes, always meeting, talking, on a panel, on the move, working, full of energy, out of the limelight, but known by many, health care workers especially. Sal talking about organizing hospitals, including, I suspect, his dream of a national “industrial” health care workers union.

Sal has been a regular at Labor Notes, beginning back in the nineties. Then, he was president of SEIU Local 250, the largest health care union in California; more recently he was a founder of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).

This past spring, however, Sal was not there as the president of NUHW, the “model union”; he’d just stepped aside after a life as a one of California’s best-known labor leaders. Not retired, he insists, still working full time for the union, “doing what I’ve always done,” he says, “working full-time leading our hospital division, among other things…We’ve got four major contract campaigns coming up, including with the hospital giants, Kaiser Permanente and Providence.” Sophia Mendoza, newly elected, a 20-year veteran of labor’s civil wars in Southern California, also a regular at Labor Notes, is stepping up.

EARLY YEARS

Sal Rosselli was born and raised in Albany, New York, in the sort of Catholic family that sends sons into the clergy. Not Sal; he did enroll in Niagara University, a Catholic university, but after two years was expelled—why? For campaigning to get the Reserve Officers Training Corps off the campus. Sal went from there to the Bowery in lower Manhattan where he worked with Dorothy Day, the legendary Catholic journalist and anarchist who edited the Catholic Worker.

He then did a stint with VISTA, but it was the sixties and California called. Inspired by the film “Easy Rider,” he and a friend rode motorcycles to the coast. There he began a pre-med course at San Francisco City College—where he was elected student body president and editor of the student newspaper.

A MAINSTAY IN THE BAY

He took a job as a janitor to pay tuition and expenses, but caught the eye of George Hardy, the founder of SEIU on the West Coast, later president of the international union, who hired him as an organizer. He has been a mainstay in the Bay Area labor movement ever since—a champion of the rank and file, of “empowering workers.” This got him fired by John Sweeney, who followed Hardy as International President of SEIU (and later of the AFL-CIO) for protesting the union’s anti-democratic practices, including few elections and double salaries. The SEIU responded by putting Local 250 into trusteeship.

Sal worked for a year in a nursing home—one that took in patients with AIDS, while keeping up the fight for reform. His New Leadership Team ran a slate for the union’s officers and executive board. With the support and guidance of the Association for Union Democracy, the slate won the majority of board seats: “We were just young kids, but our team won. We forced Sweeney to allow elections and I was elected president of Local 250.”

PRIDE AND STRUGGLE

At the height of the AIDS crisis, Local 250 created the first literature educating workers about the virus, and became a national leader in defining the mission of health care workers to ensure that everyone received compassionate care. Sal would become president of the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club, and later a Grand Marshal of the San Fransico Pride Parade. He helped lead in bringing the Pride movement into labor’s camp.

Beverly Griffith, for 30 years a housekeeper at Sutter Health in Oakland, worked with Sal throughout these years: “He led the union from 25,000 members to 150,000. I was part of a group of mostly Black women. We were strong. Sal worked with us; he depended on us. We trusted Sal. He believed that the workers are the union, that once they get that they can do anything. That’s how we grew.”

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Glenn Goldstein, now the director of organizing for NUHW, remembers first working with Sal in the ’90s to organize Catholic Healthcare West. That campaign, he said, was “ultimately successful in organizing 15,000 health care workers, one of the largest private sector organizing drives of its time.”

Goldstein points to “several things that have defined Sal’s leadership: his commitment to building rank-and-file decision-making, his commitment to building powerful democratic unions, and his is ability to lead workers in struggle.”

WAR WITH SEIU

In 2009, SEIU trusteed the local again, now statewide United Healthcare Workers-West, seizing its assets and firing its officers and staff, including Sal, Griffith, and Goldstein, in a move denounced far and wide. This time the attack was led by the corporate SEIU President Andy Stern, who believed that all power was at the top; he insisted on cutting UHW-West membership in half -without a vote—made sweetheart deals with nursing home operators and allowed for extended contracts, one 10 years long.

It involved a brutal fight—SEIU called it “World War III.” The international, with thousands of staff, unlimited cash, a fleet of lawyers, as well as the support of partisan employers, a compliant labor board and friendly judges, took the union to the dark side, run by an Ivy League grad parachuted into a union that’s thrown in the towel on organizing.

A FIGHTING UNION

In its place Sal and his supporters, most working as volunteers, started over, founding the NUHW in 2009; building brick by brick from zero. It now has 19,000 members. It once again is winning the industry’s highest standards—how? By inspiring its members, by fighting. It’s not afraid to strike and the employers know it. I suspect that most anyone who checks out NUHW’s website will be astounded by the number of rallies, picket lines, and strikes reported—all now routine.

Today NUHW is a leader in the struggle to improve access to mental health care. It is a leader in the effort to make California the first state to adopt a single-payer, Medicare-for-All health care system. No wonder Sal was one of 16 LGBTQ leaders honored last month by both houses of the California State Legislature for their contributions to the state.

I’m pretty sure Sal will be at the next Labor Notes. Keep an eye out, have a talk with him; he’ll talk to you. I think you’ll learn something.

Cal Winslow is the author of Labor’s Civil Wars in California: The NUHW Healthcare Workers’ Rebellion and Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919.