SEIU RN Dian Palmer Calls on AFL-CIO Head John Sweeney to Review Video From Dearborn Protest, Retract Statement Accepting CNA D...( Unedited video footage from Labor...),Health

Unedited video footage from Labor Notes conference shows nonviolent protest by women and children, CNA claims of violence inaccurate and exaggerated

WASHINGTON, April 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With raw video from the Labor Notes Conference in Dearborn, MI, showing a nonviolent protest held by mostly women and children, SEIU District 1199 Wisconsin President and registered nurse Dian Palmer today called on AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to retract his hasty statement last week criticizing SEIU members and accepting the inaccurate depiction presented by the California Nurses Association (CNA). Palmer urged Sweeney to view unedited video footage to determine for himself that the much-debated April 12 protest led by nurses and other workers from Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) hospitals, while certainly spirited -- in the classic tradition of labor union protests -- was brief and involved none of the widely posted but utterly inaccurate claims of orchestrated violence by the CNA and Labor Notes participants.

"The true victims of what happened in Dearborn were not the conference-goers, and not the SEIU members who came to protest," said Dian Palmer, RN, in a video message to Sweeney today. "The true victims were the Ohio hospital workers who fought for three years to form a union, but who saw their hopes and dreams disappear when dozens of CNA organizers landed in their hospitals. Now their story is being drowned out by all the inflammatory rhetoric surrounding the Labor Notes conference, just as the California Nurses Association hoped it would be." Dian's video message is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-sB4b7MCf4&feature=user.

Since the Labor Notes Conference protest -- an effort led by CHP nurses and other health care workers to express their disapproval of the CNA's sabotage of union elections for more than 8,000 hospital w
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