For years, Washington, D.C.’s Solanges Vivens has run a web of interconnected healthcare businesses that have made her a wealthy woman. The headquarters of her operation, known as VMT Long Term Care Management Inc., is located in a leafy Northwest neighborhood not far from her $1.3 million home.Vivens’s high-end offices feel a thousand miles away from the gritty D.C. streets that surround Unique Residential Care Center, a VMT-managed nursing home whose caregivers voted 165-0 to form a union with 1199SEIU last year.Vivens, who has refused to settle a fair contract with the caregivers, must have wished Unique really was a thousand miles away from VMT late last month when the 1199 caregivers showed up at her offices and started leafleting outside.That action is part of a stepped up campaign to inform D.C. residents and public officials about the many controversies swirling around Vivens and VMT.A 2010 audit by the District’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that VMT wrongly spent more than $100,000 of the city’s money on an anti-worker campaign at the Washington Center for Aging Services, a city-owned nursing home Vivens ran for the District until losing the contract last year. Although the city ordered Vivens to return the money, she’s fighting the ruling and looking to drag out her appeal till at least 2012. Vivens’s conduct toward the Unique caregivers is the subject of unfair labor practice charges before the NLRB for undermining her employees’ collective bargaining rights.The “Unique Residential Care Center” name itself is deeply controversial. “Unique” had been called J.B. Johnson Nursing Center in honor of one America’s foremost black cardiologists. But as J.B. Johnson caregivers intensified their public campaign for fairness this year, VMT wiped away the name of their institution—and this important piece of African-American history.The leafleting late last month focused on VMT’s troubled healthcare education center, which holds its classes at the company’s headquarters. VMT’s LPN training program has the highest failure rate of any licensed program in the District, and the Board of Nursing has placed the program on conditional status and may shut it down.The leaflet explained that the school’s problems date back to at least 2003, when the Board of Nursing forced VMT to close an earlier LPN training program because it, too, had such a high failure rate.VMT was clearly upset to see that information getting out. Bernice Blacknell, a CNA at Unique who helped hand out the leaflets, explained that one VMT official came out onto the sidewalk and said, “Go away, you’re hurting our numbers.”But Blacknell and the other caregivers stayed and kept leafleting. And the 1199-represented employees at the Unique Residential Care Center will continue to inform the public of the true story behind Solanges Vivens’ healthcare business.- See more at: http://www.1199seiu.org/1199_caregivers_heat_up_contract_campaign_in_dc_region#sthash.YyxP4kkN.dpuf