Hammer,
I know the UAW pretty well--I'm also a member, but of an oddball "national" local. We've had problems too, because since we're not traditional "employees" they didn't quite know how to handle us. But I also freelance for a small UAW local that's gotten pretty good service from the international, so to some extent it may depend on how your local leadership deals with them.
Unfortunately, the old-line manufacturing unions have really been under siege, and as tankers have had a hard time adjusting course--and structure, and how they function--to meet the demands of outsourcing, independent contracting, low-wage labor in Mexico, China, an alien NLRB, etc. That's not to excuse the way they've treated you and your local, only by way of trying to figure out how to deal with it. Unions are by nature "reactionary"--and I don't mean that in the traditionally nasty "ultra-right wing" definition. They "react"--always have--to the industries that they formed around; you're not going to deal w/members of the Screen Actors Guild the same way you'd deal with members of the UAW. And especially w/large organizations like the UAW, steelworkers, etc., that succeeded incredibly well in their heydays, with internal structures in place for those industries, change has been slow. The steelworkers have reacted in part by getting involved in "green jobs"; I think the UAW has been slow if not recalcitrant in going there.
All this is to say that the international's abandonment of your local may not be malice or deliberate but flailing. And the thing I'd suggest would be to learn a helluva lot about how things work internally and see if there's a way in that you can have your say, maybe see if there's a way to influence what's been going on.
I generally think it's worth a shot, because there's real potential in numbers.
Art,
It's really obscene, though not surprising, that employee medical info was so readily--illegally--avaiable to the higher echelons of that company. At the very least, if employees felt they were discriminated against because of their medical and/or disabled condition--even if they didn't know it was known--they'd have recourse to ADA and/or HIPAA (I'm not sure what if any the consequences of the latter are; hopefully there actually are some penalties in the law). But of course it makes it much tougher, as such discrimination can often be easily disguised.
Sigh.
