Community Hospital Workers and Their Allies Demand Fair Elections

Union Organizing Drive at Community Hospital Heats Up
By Mike Rhodes

Workers at Community Medical Center (CMC) in Fresno are fed up with low pay, disrespect by management, understaffed departments, and an anti-union campaign they say has violated Federal labor law. Latisha Jones, speaking at a public hearing before the Fresno Fair Election Commission, said CMC security guards told her not to hand out flyers supporting the union. Jones said the guards told her "that if we did not leave they would call police and press charges against us." Jones was there on her own time, was not blocking access to the hospital, and had a legal right to be there. She and her co-workers stayed and handed out flyers - they refused to be threatened and intimidated.

Workers like Jones are standing up for their rights and organizing a union because they want better working conditions at CMC. Workers at CMC know that employees doing the same job at Kaiser Hospital, which is union, are making twice as much money. They also know that under a union contract they will have job security, better benefits (like health care, which some workers don’t currently have for their family members), and a work environment that gives them dignity and respect.

The Fresno Fair Elections Commission is a local coalition of elected, community, medical, and religious leaders who have stepped forward to establish a free and fair election at CMC. They invited both workers and CMC management to the October 17, 2007 public hearing. Over 200 CMC workers and community members attended the public hearing at the College Community Congregational Church, but the management of CMC refused to participate.

What management would have heard, had they attended, is that workers at the hospital feel they are being threatened and intimidated because of their support for the union. These workers have filed a series of charges against management over ongoing violations of labor law. They talked about the incidents that led to the unfair labor practice charges and about why they are organizing a union.

Lydia Martinez, who is a licensed vocational nurse at Community Medical Center, was the first speaker at the hearing. She said "Community Medical Centers’ management has responded by systematically creating an atmosphere of fear and confusion with regard to our efforts to form a union." Martinez said "under current labor law, our boss is allowed to give us misinformation and half-truths. They’re even allowed to hold mandatory anti-union meetings. They can pull us off the floor and make us go to meetings, and we have no choice in the matter. Our managers can pull us into their offices for one-on-one meetings, which can be very intimidating. They’re also allowed, under the law, to take money that should be used for patient care and spend it on hiring outside groups who come in and try to stop us from forming our union."

This is the largest private sector union organizing drive in Fresno’s history

Letty Mendoza, a sterile processing technician at CMC, is a union supporter. Mendoza said she wants a union to improve patient care at CMC. At the standing room only hearing, she told co-workers and community members, "I had to attend a mandatory labor education meeting. We were in the middle of a very busy day, but everyone had to attend the meeting which put us even further behind. In the meeting the anti-union buster claimed that we had about 20 people at the press conference (which announced the union organizing drive at CMC). I raised my hand and said ‘no, that’s not true - it was about 200 people. As a matter of fact I was one of them’ I told him. For the next five minutes I kept talking and raising my hand and every time he told lies I raised my hand but he never called on me. A few minutes later a charge nurse came and made me leave the meeting. Management says they want us to have all the facts but they won’t even let me speak about the real facts." Mendoza said that after this incident she was told by a manager not to talk about the union while she was working. "I felt like he was trying to silence me, like my freedom of speech is being taken away" Mendoza said. Her manager then changed her schedule so she can no longer pick up her child after school. Mendoza believes this is retaliation for her support of the union.

Latisha Jones, who has worked for CMC for 8 years in the medical records department, said she was also forced to attend a mandatory anti-union meeting held by management. In the meeting, Jones said her manager "talked about union organizers as if they were stalking the employees in the parking lot and forcing them to sign a petition. Needless to say, the meeting did not provide any information except re-affirming that our boss did not want us to join a union." Jones found it hypocritical that CMC management demanded the right to give workers their negative views about the union but then threaten and intimidate union supporters when they talked to co-workers about the benefits of joining a union. Jones showed a photo of the security guards who tried to stop her from handing out flyers.

Sylvia Martinez is a patient care assistant in the Emergency Room at CMC who says she supports the union because she wants to see staffing levels increase. Martinez says they are so understaffed at CMC that sometimes after working a 12 hour shift, she returns 12 hours later and sees the same patients in the ER still waiting for a room. She says they ask management to help "but all they ever say is ‘we are working on it.’ Why we are so short staffed is because our pay and benefits are so low that many of us can’t afford insurance for our families . . . we can’t get our children insured. So, what do we do? We turn to state programs, it is not right working in these conditions, new hires don’t stay long."

In the mandatory "labor education" meeting Martinez was forced to attend, she was told that if she supported the union she might not get a raise in October. The instructor also told workers that if they go out on strike they will be replaced. Martinez challenged the instructor who admitted that she would not be fired, but just replaced for the day(s) she is on strike. The management instructor did not tell the workers at the meeting that their salary might double if they voted for the union.

Suzanne Sanchez works in the nutritional dietary department at CMC in Clovis. She also testified at the Fresno Fair Election Commission hearing. Sanchez supports the union because she wants to see working conditions improve. Sanchez said that "we are always short of staff, not only because of the heavy work load and lack of respect, but also because you could make a better living working at In and Out Burger."

Sanchez said "on October 4 I passed out union flyers to my co-workers outside of the Clovis campus along with my co-worker Vic Bencomo. Security came out and told us that we weren’t allowed to be on the property handing out flyers. We informed him that we have the legal right to be there. Later on my manager came out. I handed a co-worker a flyer and as she walked away my manager snatched the flyer from her hand and gave it back to me telling me that you can’t give that to her. Two other co-workers came by shortly after that and asked me what I was doing. I told them I was giving out union information and they asked for a flyer. As I tried handing them one a security guard stepped between us and physically blocked me from handing them a flyer. My co-workers asked ‘why don’t they want a union’ and I told them I will talk to you later tonight. At this point, my manager, several other bosses, security, and the CEO of the Clovis facility stood by watching and taking photographs. They made me feel like I was doing something wrong - because we refused to leave and assert our legal right to be there. They called the police on us. The Clovis police came out and they defended our right to be there. At this point, our employer backed down."

In addition to the workers testimony at the Fresno Fair Election Commission hearing, several experts spoke, including Gordon Lafer, a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. Lafer is an expert on labor law reform and has recently testified as an expert witness before Congress on this issue. He has done extensive research on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process for holding labor elections and comparing that to the democratic elections we are familiar with when we elect representatives to political office. Lafer said "when most people hear there is something called a union election, everyone assumes they must work more or less the same way as elections to Congress or the presidency or other elections that we know about. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth."

Lafer said "some people believe that as long as an election ends in a secret ballot, it doesn’t matter what happens before." He said that it is important for people to know that "the American democratic tradition from the founding fathers to the present fundamentally rejects this view. In the American system, while a secret ballot is critical, there is a series of other things that have to happen before election day, to make an election fair. Some of those things are equal access to the voters for both sides, equal access to the media, freedom from economic coercion, and free speech for the voters. Our government regularly condemns elections in other countries as undemocratic, when there is no question that they ended in a secret ballot. Saddam Huesein had secret ballots when he used to get 98% of the vote, the Soviet Union had secret ballots, North Korea and Iran - all of the Axis of Evil has secret ballots."

What happens before an election is critical. Lafer said that the goal of anti-union firms hired by companies like CMC is to prevent there ever being a secret ballot. According to Lafer, if you look at the website of the company CMC hired, "they say they specialize in union prevention, which includes successfully preventing pre-petition organizational activity, which means they don’t want there to ever be an election. What they count as a success is not that workers have a free right to choose a secret ballot. . . it is that they never have a right to choose at all. The whole thing gets killed before there ever is an election."

If they can’t prevent a free and fair election, Lafer says the union-buster’s back up plan is to have an NLRB election. Why? Because NLRB elections are stacked against the worker. Lafer said "the first most basic thing that happens in any election is that both sides have to have equal access to the voter rolls." Unlike the elections we are familiar with, NLRB elections are not set up on a level playing field. The employer has all of the employees contact information but unions do not get access to any information until after they have signed up at least 30% of workers and after all of the employers legal objections have been exhausted. Lafer said that "the last federal government commission to study this found that on average the pro-union employees only got the list of eligible voters 20 days before the vote. If you think about running for public office and imagine that everything is the same in our current system except that one candidate got the list of eligible voters two years before the election and the other got it only 20 days before the election . . . none of us would think that was a free and fair election."

Lafer said "the second principle of free elections in America is that both candidates have equal access to the voters." He said that under NLRB elections management is free to put up posters on the walls, anti-union banners hanging from the ceiling, and leaflets are distributed daily. This is done, according to Lafer, while management "tells pro-union employees that they can’t put up anything on the walls, nothing on the bulletin boards, nothing hanging from the ceiling, and can hand out leaflets only when the person handing them out and the person receiving them are on break time and in a break area."

Another sign of a free and fair election would be that a person is able to vote without the threat of economic coercion. In other words, a person should not be threatened with termination or that they will not be promoted because they vote for or against the union. But, according to Lafer, this happens all of the time under NLRB elections. Lafer said "to any normal human being there is no difference between saying ‘a union could hamper your personal relationship with this company’ and saying ‘if you ever want a promotion, don’t let me see you signing a union petition.’ To the NLRB, one is illegal and one is completely legal."

Lafer concluded, "the unfortunate fact is that our government enforces higher standards for voters in other countries than we do at home." He said that the US condemned the 2002 elections in the Ukraine for many of the same reasons there are problems with NLRB elections - voter intimidation, economic coercion, and unequal access to communicate with the voters. Lafer said "every single one of the reasons for which the Ukrainian elections were ruled undemocratic is completely legal under the NLRB. The sad fact is that our government now forces higher standards of democracy on the voters of the Ukraine. . . than for workers at workplaces anywhere across America."

Also on the panel was Mary Hilman from Mercy Hospital in Sacramento. Hilman said "when we tried to form our union without a fair election agreement, our management engaged in a campaign of misinformation and fear. They pulled us into meetings where their anti-union consultants portrayed a union in only viciously negative terms. They only gave out misinformation and lies. We got our employer to work with us to establish a fair election agreement. After that, there were no more mandatory anti-union meetings, no more misleading information, and we all felt free to talk about the union and make a choice on our own."

Deborah Byrne, who has worked as a medical assistant with Kaiser Permanente for 8 years, was the last speaker at the Fresno Fair Election Commission hearing. Byrne said "when we, the employees of Kaiser, work with our management, we reach positive solutions. Kaiser’s recent move to a paperless system for our Medical Records department would have displaced about 2,000 employees. We worked together with management and found a solution where not a single Medical Records worker was let go. We worked with Kaiser to insure that people were put into positions with the same rate of pay or received upgrade training into a higher classification. If we weren’t union, I think those 2,000 co-workers would have been without jobs.

CMC workers are organizing their union with the Service Employee International Union - United Healthcare West. SEIU-UHW is the largest hospital and healthcare union in the United States and represents every type of healthcare worker, including nurses, professional, technical and service classifications. There are about 2,000 workers in the CMC bargaining unit that is currently being organized, making this the largest private sector union organizing drive in Fresno’s history.

For more information about the organizing campaign, see http://www.fresnocmcworkersunited.org/ or call 559 265-4890.

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The Fresno Fair Elections Commission members:

John R. Donaldson, Chair
Former Fresno County Supervisor
Local Healthcare Coalition

Harry Armstrong
Mayor Pro Tem, Clovis City Council

Sengthiene Bosavanh
Attorney at Law

Mary Curry
Former Trustee, Fresno Unified School District

Anne Jenny
Economist, Multi-party and Community Mediation

Roger Larson, M.D.
Former Chief of Medicine, University Medical Center

Patience Milrod
Lawyer

Rev. Walt Parry
Fresno Metro Ministry

Henry T. Perea
President, Fresno City Council

Fr. James Rude, S.J.
Social Justice Ministry Director, Catholic Diocese of Fresno

Tony Vang, Ph.D.
Trustee, Fresno Unified School District

Pat Wolk
Community Activist

(from the workers website - http://www.fresnocmcworkersunited.org/ )

Free and Fair Election Agreement

As part of our effort to form a union and win a voice on the job, workers at Community Medical Centers are seeking a Free and Fair Election Agreement with management at CMC.

What it is
Such an agreement is a commitment from both management at CMC and SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West to "play fair" while workers consider forming a union. It's a negotiated set of principles that both sides can agree to.

What it does
A Free and Fair Election Agreement sets ground rules for the process by which workers decide on whether to form a union. The proposal from CMC workers calls for the following.

* No negative campaigning that disparages the employer or the union
* No mandatory one-on-one or group meetings
* Equal access to factual information
* No use of outside consultants
* No harassment, intimidation or discrimination against employees because of their support of or opposition to the union
* Quick and effective enforcement of election conduct by a neutral third party
* Secret-ballot elections conducted and certified by the National Labor Relations Board

Why we need one
Existing federal law does not offer enough protection to workers. Already, management at CMC has created an intimidating work environment and threatened patient care by pulling healthcare workers away from the floor to attend meetings filled with anti-union propaganda. With a Free and Fair Election Agreement, workers can weigh their options and make a decision without facing that kind of negative pressure.