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Session:         Page of 592

without saying that. Nor did the publication do anything to permit the other side, the Save Our Union people, to have a voice in the publication, to state their case. As a matter of fact the announcement of the election, which is required by the Department of Labor, appeared in the publication not in a prominent space, without any list of candidates. It just said, “There will be an election in cooperation with the Department of Labor for union officers, president, etcetera, etcetera,” and did not say who was running for or against. No names were mentioned. The publication is a very, very important factor.

Then the question of funds. The union funds were utilized throughout the campaign to support the Turner machine. It reached a point that at the very end, after she had been defeated and submitted objections to the election, in that period before the new leadership had been seated by the Department of Labor, Turner spent -- by actual record -- close to 85,000 dollars of union funds to carry on the protest against the election. The full amount of money that Turner spent for the election during the campaign is not known, nor will it ever be known because so much of it is hidden in various ways -- even though we now have access to the finances of the union.

On top of that the law itself is written in such a manner to help incumbents and hurt opposition, rank and file oppositionists. We've gone through the question of the difference between a court order election and an election in which the Department of Labor supervises the election. Some examples of the differences as they reflected themselves in the election deal with the setting of dates, times, and places for voting. The union, the Turner people, had their way in virtually every case. Members who worked in hospitals where there was known Turner opposition would have to travel as far as thirty to sixty miles to vote, in contrast with a small institution with Turner supporters, where the balloting was inside the hospital. That was repeated in any number of cases. In the area of homecare, which was a complete question mark since we had no contacts with the homecare people -- and that's about ten to twelve thousand eligible voters -- Turner arranged with the homecare vendors for the workers to receive their pay on the day and at the place where they were voting. This was unheard of in the past. The pay was sent to the workers through the mail. The idea was that if the workers came to pick up their checks right before they voted, you virtually had to vote in order to get your check, that workers would vote for Turner. This didn't work out that way.

Anyway, the key issues in the campaign were determined by the Save Our Union campaign on the basis of polling. Polling was undertaken





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