Two of the nation's biggest nurses' unions are engaged in a slugfest over workers, seeking to spoil each others' organizing drives with tactics normally used against employers, including ad campaigns, lawsuits and infiltrating job sites.
The fight between the giant Service Employees International Union and a smaller union, the California Nurses Association, began in Ohio and has spread in recent weeks to Texas, Nevada and New York. Last week, SEIU filed suit against CNA in Iowa District Court in Johnson County, alleging that CNA illegally acquired a confidential mailing list of SEIU members it used to send promotional flyers critical of SEIU.
Both unions are trying to boost membership in a fast-growing sector of the economy. Last year, 7.5% of the private-sector work force belonged to unions, down from 17% 25 years ago, according to the Labor Department.
CNA says nurses would be better represented by a registered-nurses-only union that could focus on issues including nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. The union represents 80,000 registered nurses, mostly in California, but also in Maine, Illinois and Nevada.
SEIU, which represents 85,000 registered nurses out of its 1.7 million members, says nurses are better off in a bigger union that would also fight for other hospital workers and improve hospital-wide standards.
In Ohio, SEIU spent three years trying to organize 8,000 nurses at a Catholic health-care system and was hoping to use the Ohio union as a springboard to organize Catholic hospitals in other states. Before a mid-March SEIU vote, CNA sent representatives to Ohio hospitals to distribute promotional flyers saying SEIU had reached a back-door deal with the employer.
Susan Horne, 48 years old, a registered nurse in Cincinnati, said CNA organizers posed as Pizza Hut delivery workers to gain access to her nurse's unit. Ms. Horne, an SEIU supporter, said, "I told them, 'You have not been here for three years yet you come here five days before the election and try to sabotage our vote.' "
CNA's interference incensed SEIU, and the vote was canceled. "Their distortions and holier-than-thou statements are nothing more than a flimsy cover for out-and-out union busting," said SEIU President Andy Stern.
Orest Holubec, spokesman for Catholic Healthcare Partners, said management agreed to the election and a two-week period without pressure from SEIU or management so that employees could choose whether they wanted to join the union. He said CNA organizers entered restricted areas in hospitals and "engaged in the exact type of tactics we were trying to avoid." He said the health-care system, which employs 37,000 people in Ohio and four other states, won't agree to another vote "until the unions work out their turf wars."
Rose Ann DeMoro, the head of CNA, argues that while SEIU and the employer reached an agreement to hold the election, nurses didn't widely support SEIU. "Nurses didn't really have a choice," she said. She called allegations that CNA organizers posed as delivery workers "outrageous lies."
A month after the Ohio election was scuttled, SEIU sent six busloads of organizers to a labor conference where Ms. DeMoro was scheduled to speak. A scuffle broke out. An SEIU protester had a heart attack on the scene and later died. Another attendee went to the hospital for stitches. The action was broadly criticized within the labor movement. CNA has since boosted security at its headquarters, Ms. DeMoro said, installing security cameras and posting guards.
Mr. Stern has urged John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO, to condemn CNA, which belongs to the federation, saying it is flouting AFL-CIO antiraiding rules.
Instead Mr. Sweeney asked Mr. Stern and Ms. DeMoro to resolve their dispute through mediation, to avoid damaging labor's influence during the presidential campaign. Unions "simply cannot afford to see their political, legislative and policy agendas derailed by the escalation of these disputes," Mr. Sweeney wrote to Mr. Stern recently.
Both unions have run ads attacking each other on progressive sites such as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. CNA sent mailers to SEIU members, which included a form to decertify the SEIU, while SEIU hired a company to poll CNA members. In an audio recording of a 13-minute call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the person conducting the poll asks a CNA member to respond to statements, including CNA is "wasting members' dues" and "acting like CEO union-busters."
Meanwhile, students earning their nursing degrees, health-care employers and their consultants are watching from the sidelines. "We love it," says Bill Adams, a labor-relations consultant in Fort Wright, Ky., who works with hospitals but isn't involved in the Ohio dispute. "You're guided by the principle, 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' "
By: Kris Maher
Wall Street Journal; May 19, 2008
