Cat fight: Humane Society battling union over workers, bad raps

Published 12:03 pm Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Seattle Humane Society is sparring with a local union over employee representation and quality of care at regional facilities.

The fight follows a recent whistle-blower report slamming a separate animal-care organization, King County Animal Care and Control (KCACC), for alleged mistreatment, neglect and overcrowding at its Kent shelter.

A KCACC employee, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, issued the report to the county ombudsman in August. The ombudsman confirmed that the whistle-blower does indeed work for KCACC.

Meanwhile, the Animal Control Officer’s Guild, which represents employees at KCACC, found a whistle-blower of its own: a Humane Society worker who alleges quality-of-care problems such as overcrowding, ventilation problems, and lack of concern about disease prevention at the organization’s Bellevue campus.

“You can tell the problems there are just as bad,” said officers’ guild president John Diel. “It’s just not public.”

Coinciding with these accusations is a fight between the guild and the Humane Society over unionization.

Workers at the Humane Society voted Sept. 29 by a one-person margin to join the officers’ guild. The Humane Society has appealed the outcome on grounds that its workers thought they were voting to create a union of their own.

Diel says the vote is legitimate, and indicative of problems at the animal-care facility in Bellevue.

“People don’t want to organize a union unless they have severe problems with working conditions,” he said. “These people obviously thought there were problems, and they felt the conditions were affecting the animals in a negative way.”

The guild has accused the Humane Society of mistreating its employees, and issued a statement Tuesday suggesting that over 60 workers have left the organization in the last 18 months.

Asked about the turnover rate, Humane Society CEO Brenda Barnett did not explicitly deny the union’s figure. She did, however, say that 31 people had left the organization in the last six months, noting that many of them departed on good terms.

Barnett says the guild’s accusations are part of an act of survival for employees of the KCACC.

King County Interim Executive Kurt Triplett proposed closing the agency in his 2010 budget, and executive candidates Dow Constantine and Susan Hutchison are both pushing for the county to get out of the animal-care business.

In addition, a 2008 report from the University of California Davis revealed a multitude of problems with procedures and facilities at the Kent shelter.

“The union is scared that it’s going away because we’re going to be doing the work,” Barnett said.

Diel claims KCACC employees are victims of a smear campaign orchestrated by the likes of Constantine and the Humane Society.

“They’ve been trying to put us out of business for years,” he said. “Dow Constantine has done everything including lying, cheating, and stealing to get rid of us.”

Constantine’s campaign spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik, had this to say about Diel’s comment:

“Dow Constantine’s concern all along has been that animals in the care of King County are treated humanely. There have been multiple outside studies and reports that have shown that the (KCACC), the way it’s being run, has fallen far short of that mission.

“If you can’t reform a shelter, we need to find a better way to do this.”

As for why the Humane Society would want to see a fellow animal-care organization collapse, Diel says it’s a money grab.

“Along with shelter contracts comes funding,” he said.

King County Executive’s Office spokeswoman Carolyn Duncan said the latest idea county officials have discussed is to get out of the animal-sheltering business altogether while continuing to do animal-control enforcement.

The Humane Society says it’s prepared to pick up any slack from a potential closing of the KCACC shelter in Kent, and the organization has come up with a plan to reconfigure 6,451 square feet of space at its Bellevue campus to house additional animals in that event.