A labor-backed ballot proposition that would have capped the salaries of hospital chief executive officers in California has been pulled from the November ballot.
The proposition, known as the Hospital Executive Compensation Act, was pulled from the ballot after the California Hospital Association (CHA) chose to fight it in court. Backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the proposition would have capped hospital CEO pay at $450,000 a year, according to California HealthLine.
Although the proposition had garnered enough signatures to place it on the ballot, both an arbitrator and a Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled that it violated an agreement that the SEIU-UHW and the CHA had entered into in 2014 to work collaboratively to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals. That agreement was entered into in lieu of the union agreeing to withdraw a ballot proposition that would have sought to limit executive pay at hospitals.
That pact expired at the end of last year, but SEIU-UHW had apparently filed paperwork for the ballot proposition about a month before its expiration, according to California HealthLine.
“We think this was a deeply flawed decision,” SEIU-UHW spokesperson Steve Trossman told California HealthLine.
The CHA told the publication that “SEIU-UHW’s track record of filing ballot initiatives as a strategy to force hospitals to cede to their organizing demands is a self-serving abuse of the initiative process.”
The one time a union-backed ballot proposition reached voters, they narrowly approved it. That was in 2012, and regarded limiting the compensation of the CEO at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, which is governed by a public district. The district was able to get the decision overturned as part of a legal challenge.
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