> But short of that, what's your source on this? The only people
> I've heard make such claims about CNA are SEIU people; the claims
> about SEIU have been made by internal dissidents, including the
> leader of a large local who's about to be trusteed. Are there CNA
> dissidents? I'm not saying they don't exist - I just haven't heard of
> any. Have you?
We know because the companies -- Catholic Healthcare West and Tenet Healthcare in this instance -- tell us when they sign a deal with the CNA. CNA also obliquely refers to such agreements in press releases:
"In a separate agreement, CNA/NNOC and Tenet negotiated "a national organizing pact" governing fair representation election procedures for Tenet RNs, according to the CNA. Tenet described it as a separate, five-year "peace accord" that includes a process to resolve issues between the parties, and grants CNA and its national affiliate "certain limited rights to attempt to organize nurses at some Tenet hospitals outside California.""
http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/in-the-news/2007/august/page.jsp?itemID=31699511
Ask CNA PR flack Chuck Idelson if he'll give you a copy of this agreement. Then ask him why the CNA was critical of SEIU's with Tenet in early 2003, yet signed a virtually identical agreement later on that year. The agreement referenced in the CNA press release above is a successor agreement to the organizing agreement first signed in 2003.
Again, such organizing agreements are not in and of themselves bad things. It's what unions have to do to organize on scale today because union election laws (as whittled down by the judiciary and the NLRB) are so poor. Obviously, such agreements are open to abuse -- one union I used to work for had an agreement to organize one plant for a national employer per year with the understanding that they wouldn't cause problems (e.g. fight for better standards in contracts, other bread-and-butter union stuff) elsewhere. I'm not saying this is the case with CNA, and it's certainly not the case with SEIU.
Don't know of any organized CNA dissident groups offhand. But my best guess is that you'll soon hear from CNA members who aren't happy that Rose Ann Demoro used their $90 per month dues to fight a hospital unionization drive in Ohio.