San Francisco home care workers called for a hand-examination of each signed card submitted by Sal Rosselli and other ousted union officials seeking to decertify SEIU-UHW, saying they had been subjected to lies, coercion, and fraud.

Some workers were told that signing a card was the only way they could keep their union, while others were threatened that they could be deported if they did not sign. In some cases, NUHW representatives said they were from a government agency, and in still others they pressured family members and even home care consumers to sign the cards, rendering them invalid if thoroughly checked.

Workers have shared more than 1,000 stories describing how NUHW improperly collected signatures and asking to have their cards returned. NUHW's tactics are part of a pattern that emerged in Fresno earlier this year when more than a third of the cards they collected from home care workers were found to be invalid when hand checked. SEIU- UHW caught examples of these tactics on video, as described by the workers. Watch a clip of one of the home care workers here:

A U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of California last night granted SEIU-UHW members a preliminary injunction against the local union's former officers (including former president Sal Rosselli) and agents, finding that they "filched" and "sabotaged" files, records, and union property as part of their plan to form a new union.

"Upon leaving UHW, the individual defendants took and reproduced UHW property for use at NUHW and destroyed other UHW property in an effort to hamstring their soon-to-be competitor," wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

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The votes were counted last week in an important union election among 10,000 home care workers in Fresno County, California. Now that the dust is settled, here is more detail about what the Fresno home care election victory signifies--and what it means going forward.