Nurses at Our Lady of the Resurrection Medical Center on the Northwest Side have voted 159-98 against joining the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees union.
The election, which took place Wednesday and Thursday, was the first in the union’s eight-year campaign to organize Our Lady of the Resurrection and five other Chicago-area hospitals run by the Catholic institution.
AFSCME officials said they hope to overturn the results by filing objections with the National Labor Relations Board citing hospital efforts to discourage employees from voting for unionization.
“They used every tactic, legal and illegal, to create fear and poison the atmosphere,” said Roberta Lynch, deputy director of AFSCME Council 31.
In a statement, Resurrection Health Care spokesman Brian Crawford said, “Any allegations by AFSCME of improper or illegal behavior on the part of Resurrection Health Care are patently false.”
CEO Martin Judd said the hospital intends “to put this divisive issue in the past and unify around the common goal of providing the best possible care to the patients we serve.”
Lynch said more than 50 percent of union-eligible nurses signed cards saying they wanted a union. Ninety-four percent of eligible nurses voted this week, suggesting that many who had signed cards decided to vote against the union.
Union leaders said hospital officials “attacked leaders of the campaign, they issued an order prohibiting nurses from being anywhere in the hospital if they were not working, which means you couldn’t even get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria after work or stop to talk to someone in the corridor. That was all to stop nurses from talking to each other about the union.”
Maggie Nielsen, an emergency room nurse at Resurrection for 15 years, said management “had doctors stopping us in the elevators asking, ‘How are you going to vote? How are you going to vote?’” she said. “They said if there was a union they would take their patients somewhere else and the hospital would close.”
She said immigrant nurses were told they wouldn’t get their customary month off each year to visit their home countries if a union came in.
Lynch said nurses wanted to unionize to have a greater say in management decisions regarding patient care, and to challenge “the arbitrariness of management decisions.” She said economic considerations around pay and benefits were secondary to these issues.
“What was compelling these nurses most fundamentally was concern about patient care,” she said. “They felt no one was interested in what they had to say.”
Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer who has represented nurses at other facilities, said he finds AFSCME’s charges of intimidation “credible” and believes nurses likely got “jitters” about losing their jobs because of management threats.
Geoghegan added that AFSCME’s organizing campaign at Resurrection is significant because the union, which typically represents government employees, is seeking to organize a private institution. Nationwide unionization rates of public employees exceed rates for private employees, and since the battles over public employee union rights in Wisconsin and other states this year, there has been more scrutiny of contracts for public employees.