L ucila Conde, a translator at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego is currently living through one of the biggest disappointments of her life. Apart from her 8-to-4:30 day job, Conde devoted herself full time to organizing hundreds of underpaid employees, including many immigrant workers into a union. She was supported by the Service Employees International Union, the largest and the fastest growing union in the country.

Along with Conde, workers at Children’s Hospital dreamt of a union contract that would guarantee pay raises and provide job security for hundreds of workers in the region’s only comprehensive pediatric care facility. The campaign had been underway for two years by the time Conde joined the fight in 2005. Every year and each step of the way, the workers faced resistance and sabotage from anti-union hospital managers. It was a bloody and exhausting six-year saga for the workers and their union supporters.

After three years of tortuous and contentious negotiations, labor and management agreed upon the first ever collective bargaining contract for a private healthcare employer in San Diego County in 2007. Conde and her co-workers joined the ranks of tens of thousands of low-wage unionized workers across the Southwest. Workers had recently seen their working conditions improved by the SEIU and other service-sector unions. Many saw new life in a labor movement plagued by decay and irrelevancy.

The Children’s Hospital contract was far from ideal, but the unionization of the facility represented a major milestone. SEIU had broken through and won an agreement with what had long been an impenetrable private healthcare industry. In spite of the many compromises they had to make in the contract, it was a hard-fought dream come true for Conde, her colleagues and the union.

A mere two years later, the union was in pieces at Children’s Hospital. Better said, the union had evaporated. SEIU abruptly and unceremoniously withdrew its representation of the workers in March just before negotiations for a new contract would have commenced, and in the face of a relentless anti-union campaign resourced by hospital administrators. The collapse of the union at the hospital erased not only the individual opportunities for the 750 unionized workers, but also an opportunity to make San Diego a union town.

“When I found out from management that SEIU was planning on pulling out, I just couldn’t believe it,” Conde says. “I thought it was rumors and another part of the dirty campaign against us from management.

“I feel betrayed and abandoned by SEIU.”

What happened at Children’s Hospital this year is emblematic of organized labor’s plight across California and across the country. Conde’s union, the SEIU, and other service unions rode the crest of a decades-long wave to aggressively organize entire industries. Hundreds of thousands of workers like those at Children’s Hospital were unionized, and the labor movement began to build on growth that begain in the mid-1980s. Los Angeles was the epicenter of this labor renewal in the 1990s, and the contract campaign at Children’s Hospital was a primary beachhead for the movement’s expansion into San Diego.

The hopes of labor were furthered buoyed by the rise of Barack Obama, in whose campaign the SEIU invested $60 million. Labor leaders believed his victory would fuel the positive trends that took root in the hostile environs of the Bush administration.

Things have not worked out that way. San Diego joins a growing number of California communities salted by disillusioned workers. At Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, employees were caught between warring factions in the labor movement. Anti-union employers, in turn, exploited the division. The vicious factional fighting within labor has been flaring in hot spots stretching from the Bay Area to Fresno to Las Vegas to Phoenix and at least another half-dozen communities in the Southwest.

Precisely at the moment when SEIU, as the most powerful organizing and mobilizing force in labor should be peaking in influence, it has descended into a virulent and self-destructive civil war in which Conde, her co-workers and thousands more like them across the U.S. have become its ultimate victims. SEIU’s growing conflicts with former leaders of its California healthcare workers division and once-allied unions like UNITE-HERE means it has fewer resources to guide workers along the avenue to a better life. The money and firepower SEIU uses against targeted employers is now being turned against itself and its one-time allies. No story better illustrates the radical shift of fortune for organized labor than what happened to Conde and her co-workers in San Diego.

T he union organizing drive at Children’s Hospital began in 2003, and within a year the union won formal recognition. Bargaining sessions between the union and hospital officials began shortly after, and almost immediately management resisted an agreement. Negotiations were stalled for two years while a handful of plain-clothes strangers with hospital badges began ingratiating themselves among the workers, and relaying union horror stories in the staff cafeteria to any who would listen, employees said. Some workers began to turn away from the union.

“They say [the strangers are] educators, but we call [them] union-busters,” said Macrina Cale, a certified nurse’s assistant and self-described “pillar” of union support in the hospital. “The way they talk is very manipulative. If you don’t attend the SEIU meeting, if you are not really pro-union, you would be with them.”

Conde said it was not easy to distinguish them from regular workers “unless you found yourself in a meeting they were conducting.”

By 2007, union officials were seeing their popular support slip. They reversed position and accepted contract terms that year, which they initially rejected as underwhelming in 2006. Despite unfavorable terms, the contract was in place and that alone could have been a moment of unity for workers, union staff and hospital administrators.

A month into the contract, however, management stopped honoring the agreement and banned union staff from entering the worksite and refused to honor employees’ rights under the contract, workers said.

“We never had a party,” Cale said. “Because of what happened, we were denied a celebration.”

Hospital officials chose to ignore the more than half-dozen requests to respond for this story. “You’ve got to understand the board of Children’s, with a few exceptions, is led by really anti-union folks,” said Richard Barrera, a former SEIU organizer.

Lawyers for the hospital extrapolated bureaucratic manifestations of the union to create a claim that not only was the contract void, but that the union did not exist all together. SEIU challenged this claim and it was dismissed, but 15 months later. Hospital administrators denied union staff access to workers for more than one year, and the damage was done.

Hospital brass “had full, unfettered access to the workers and dragged the process to the point where you only had a dwindling core of activists who were trying to keep things going,” said Barrera, now vice president of the San Diego Unified School District.

“To most of the workers, the union was dead,” he said. “The only presence of the union was that the hospital would send weekly or daily emails, fliers or hold captive audience meetings ripping the union apart.”

(Continued in Part II)