St. Francis Hospital and Advocate Health Care have each proposed new hospitals in the Tinley Park –Orland Park area. It’s expected that the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board will decide within the next few months whether to approve either proposal.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has mounted an aggressive campaign to influence public opinion against the Advocate facility. It sent out a mailing to area residents last week asserting, "If Advocate comes to town, our health care may be at risk."

The union’s brochure claims that if Advocate is permitted to construct a new hospital in the area, patients may pay more for health care, might be subjected to harsh collection policies, and perhaps would no longer be able to use their family doctor.

Reading the union’s mailing raised my suspicions.

Labor unions are primarily in the business of increasing membership and expanding their power. Oh, yeah, and collecting fat dues from their members.

They’re not generally known for their attention to the public interest, unless that public interest intersects with increasing membership, expanding power and collecting fat dues.

Could the SEIU’s opposition to Advocate possibly be based on something more selfish than its concerns about higher patient costs and the other things detailed in its mailing? There’s evidence that may be exactly the case.

In January of 2003, the SEIU suggested a partnership proposal to Advocate. Included in it was a demand that Advocate assume a position of neutrality on union efforts to organize its almost 25,000 employees. Ed Domansky, the system’s media relations director, told me that the SEIU called for "wall-to-wall unions at Advocate."

The union also wanted names, home telephone numbers and other personal contact information of employees.

Advocate balked. Coincidentally no doubt, the SEIU at about that time launched the Hospital Accountability Project.

The Project, according to SEIU’s website is "aimed at improving health care by making quality, affordable health care available to everyone." This can be a commendable goal, depending on the methods used.

The principal process used by the SEIU and its Hospital Accountability Project is to vilify Advocate Health Care with a vengeance. In this drive, it’s enlisted a bunch of Chicago ministers and other religious leaders, Jesse Jackson – no doubt frustrated at not having been on TV for several weeks – and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan who, like most Democrats, finds bashing successful and large enterprises just too tempting to pass up.

I don’t really care if the Service Employees International Union wants to attack Advocate. That’s its right. What I do object to is the SEIU not being upfront about why it’s doing that.

The union wants more members and their dues. At a time when union participation is at an all-time low, the SEIU has grown and is now the largest union in the AFL-CIO. It claims to represent about 750,000 healthcare workers and obviously views that component of the economy as ripe for expansion.

The SEIU’s tactics with Advocate represents a departure from traditional ways of organizing employees. The standard method has been to gather signatures of 30 percent or more of the workers. Then the National Labor Relations Board is petitioned and an election is conducted to determine representation.

But these days it can be difficult to persuade a significant percentage of the workforce to seek collective bargaining. There have been too many instances of unions representing themselves rather than the interests of their membership.

It may be easier to wage a war of vilification against an employer. Massive negative publicity and the attendant expenses could push an employer to grease the way for the union to move in.

The SEIU maintains its interest is in affordable health care. There isn’t, however, normally a correlation between unions and lower costs. According to the AFL-CIO, weekly median earnings of a union worker are 27 percent greater than those of non-union employees. So will collective bargaining really make health care more affordable?

The Service Employees International Union should set aside the pretense and be candid about its motives. It’s clear that if the SEIU succeeded in unionizing Advocate Health Care, the corporate character assassination would end immediately.