New York Times - March 12, 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/us/12union.html>
Rival Unions Battle in Ohio Over Workers at Hospitals By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The Service Employees International Union was brimming with confidence about unionizing 8,300 workers at nine Ohio hospitals through elections that were scheduled for this Wednesday and Friday. But then organizers from a rival union, the California Nurses Association, swept into town, buttonholing workers and maneuvering their way into hospital wards, to press the workers to vote not to join the S.E.I.U.
Thrown off balance, the service employees union on Tuesday suddenly asked to postpone the vote by workers at the nine hospitals, all part of the Catholic Healthcare Partners system.
Andy Stern, the service employees’ president, said the nurses association’s efforts were “nothing more than a flimsy cover for out- and-out union busting that we normally see from employers, not organizations that claim to care about workers.”
The California Nurses Association, an unusually militant union that is seeking to expand nationwide, said it dispatched organizers to Ohio because in its view the unionization efforts were part of a sweetheart deal.
Having seen many employers mount fierce campaigns against unionization, the service employees had reached an unusual deal with Catholic Healthcare Partners, to increase its chances of winning a unionization election. Catholic Healthcare and the union promised to campaign civilly and not mount angry all-out efforts against each other.
Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses association, condemned this agreement. She called it “a rigged scam” in which the service employees union would bargain only half-heartedly if it won the vote.
“This was a top-down deal between an employer and a hand-picked union,” Ms. DeMoro said. “There was a gag order on everyone, and as a result this was a banana republic election.”
She said the decision to delay the election was “a significant victory for employee rights.”
No new election date was set.
Service employee officials said the agreement sought to maximize the union’s chances of winning a fair election in an era when unions are struggling to reverse decades of decline.
Dave Regan, president of a service employees’ local representing 35,000 health care workers in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, called the nurses union’s efforts immoral and despicable.
“Their conduct is indistinguishable from that of the most vicious anti-union employers,” Mr. Regan said. “It violates every principle of unionism. Real people are worse off today as a result of their behavior.”
He ridiculed the notion that the service employees were a hand-picked union. He said it took three years of negotiations, letter writing and protests by hundreds of workers to press Catholic Healthcare into agreeing to the election agreement. Those efforts came after the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the service employees and other unions urged several Roman Catholic bishops to press many Catholic hospitals to stop being so hostile toward unionization.
Responding to Ms. DeMoro’s assertion that the union had entered a sweetheart deal in which it would bargain halfheartedly, Mr. Regan noted that after unionizing 550 nurses at a Catholic Healthcare hospital in Lorain, Ohio, the service employees staged two contentious strikes in an effort to obtain a contract.
Orest Holubec, spokesman for Catholic Healthcare, said the system’s hospital in Lima had obtained a restraining order to bar the California nurses from entering restricted patient-care areas and aggressive leafletting outside hospitals.
“They were doing exactly the kind of things we were trying to avoid,” Mr. Holubec said. “They poisoned the well to the degree that we didn’t have the conditions that we tried to establish for a pressure- free environment.”
The service employees union and the California Nurses Association both represent tens of thousands of nurses and have fought for years, with the nurses association arguing in Ohio and elsewhere that skilled workers like nurses should belong to nurses’ unions and not to unions of diverse workers like the service employees.