One often hears in rather vague terms about the anti union campaigns that employers run when their employees try to unionize. For the majority of Kossacks who have never experienced one directly, I thought it might be interesting to hear directly from one who has been through a pretty tough campaign.
To lay the ground work for it, I'll first tell a little bit about the NLRB election process. While each campaign is uniqe in some ways, many features are the same, so our's is probably a fairly typical example.
First a little bit about myself. I'm a registered nurse since 1981. I've worked my whole nursing career for one employer, nearly all of it in one department. For 13 years, I was in management, then stepped down to become a staff nurse in 1997. I continued to have a good personal relationship with management in general and my own boss in particular. On the other hand, I had seen the impact of an increasingly corporate and bottom-line-focused management style - watched many of my co-workers struggling with tougher work loads, fewer resources and a hard nosed management attitude.
I hadn't given much thought to unionizing myself, but had always been vaguely supportive of the idea of unions and well aware of their historic role.
So one day I when walked into the ICU and my friend Paula said: "there's a California Nurses Association organizer meeting with us tonight, why don't you come?",
I was interested enough to go. The meeting was at a local hotel, and there were maybe 30 nurses in the room. The organizer, a nurse herself, was reasonably impressive, rather low key, not hard sell at all. She gave us a fair amount of literature to take away, made no extravagant promises, explained the election process. She asked us about our reasons for being interested in organizing. I remember being very impressed that not one nurse mentioned wages or benefits. What everyone talked about were things like safe care, the ability to control our practice and being treated with respect.
So now, I'll switch gears and talk generically about the NLRB election process. This is not the only way to organize, but is still pretty common. However, the Bush NLRB has become so hostile to unions that more and more organizing tries to avoid the NLRB and take other routes. I'll focus on the NLRB process since that's what I mostly know.
Often the process begins when a group of workers gets fed up with something in their work life and contacts a union. Typically, an organizer is sent in to assess the situation, meeting with a small group of workers at first. Those workers begin talking to their co-workers; the meetings get larger. If the organizers feel there is enough interest to justify a campaign, the effort becomes more formalized. A committee is formed, largely self-selected, of the leaders who form the nucleus of the campaign. You want the committee to be broadly representative of all departments and shifts if possible. Once things have progressed far enough, a card signing campaign begins. Workers are asked to sign cards stating that they want to be represented by the union for collective bargaining. A union can call for an election once they have cards from 30% of the workers, but almost never do until they have more than a majority, since they know they'll likely lose some once the anti-union campaign begins
Usually management finds out about the union presence pretty early, but certainly they do once the card signing begins. If an anti-union campaign has not begun before, it surely will now.
Once the union has enough cards to meet its threshold for calling an election, they submit the cards to the NLRB. There are then a variety of formalities and negotiations, often focussed on the critical issue of who is in the bargaining unit and who is not. Much of this centers on who is and is not a supervisor - a subject for a whole other diary and much recent controversy
Anyway, once all that is settled, a date is set for an election, usually about 6 weeks later. Then the real campaign begins. A union election is the ultimate in retail politics, with voters targeted one by one. Finally the election day arrives. The ballotting may be over one or more days, depending on the numbers involved and the number of work sites. The counting is done right after the polls close and the results announced immediately.
So ... Back to our story.
About the time we started gathering cards, we got word through the grapevine that the hospital had hired an anti-union consulting company (union buster) called the Burke Group. Burke has one of the dirtiest reputations in the industry, so we had a pretty good idea we'd be in for a fight, but none of us could have imagined how bad it would get.
The first salvo was a letter, over the signature of our CEO, but certainly not his writing. The letter went out to employees, volunteers and members of the medical staff. It was an amazing set of lies, half truths and distortions from top to bottom. The general theme was along the lines that management had heard that some of our nurses were being harassed by some evil outsiders wanting them to form a union. Some specific statements were that the union would do anything to get employees to sign the card (false), commiserating with emplyees about the fact that organizers were likely visiting them at their homes (false) and so on. Distortions, loaded language, outright lies, etc.
In one stroke, that letter turned me from a moderate supporter to a raging activist. It just made me angry to be lied to. I drafted my own reply, pointing out all the ways that the letter differed from my personal experience with the organizers. I copied off a bunch of copies of the letter and took it around to various floors. Lots of fun.
By this point the union busters, about 6 of them or so, had moved into the administrative offices of the hospital and essentially taken over. It is typical of an anti campaign that the busters largely run the entire operation, or at least the personnel aspects of it, for the duration of the campaign. Everything - and I do mean everything - takes second place to the goal of beating the union.
Next, big locked, glass fronted bulletin boards went up in every unit. The point being to give management control over all postings. A series of "labor law classes" were announced. These of course were unabashed propaganda sessions, replete with lies and distortions. A key part of the plan was to take items from the union bylaws out of context and distort them in ways that made them look like they meant things they did not. These classes could actually be kind of fun. We tried to make sure we had a strong activist in every session so that there would be someone to speak up and question the more outrageous assertions.
We started to get a steady flow of anti-union propaganda both mailed to our homes and handed out at work. Certain themes showed up over and over in this material:
- The union as an "outside third party" that would come between management and employees, ending our ability to talk to each other directly.
- Lots of innuendo and emotionally loaded words.
- Taking items from other union contracts or union bylaws out of context to try to make them look bad.
- Recurrent mention of things like initiation fees, penalties and fines that unions might levy on their members - all of which are non-existent in our union, though they may have existed in some union somewhere.
Another thing we started to see was that our managers began to go off the deep end - especially those we knew and liked and had good relationships with. We had a hard time understanding it at the time, but now I know that the core of an anti-union campaign is what the union busters do to the front line managers. The managers are subjected to a relentless campaign of intimidation and fear around these themes:
- If your employees vote for a union it will be a disaster for the hospital and you personally.
- If the union wins it means you are a bad manager.
- If the union wins you might lose your job.
All of this gets even the most reasonable and sensible managers to believe anything bad about the union and those supporting it.
Another standard practice we experienced is the formation of an anti committee. In our case it was a small group of former managers and doctrinaire Republican types - about 8 to 10 all together - who pretended to be a totally independant committee of nurses opposing unionization. Management isn't allowed to help such a committee, but like most American labor law that is routinely violated. Ours got an office in the building and food from the cafeteria for their meetings.
The literature wars were pretty fun. Management of course got to put all their propaganda up behind locked bulletin boards, hand it out in staff meetings and mail it to our homes. We tried to keep our stuff visible too, and since there were a lot of us working on it, it was pretty much a full time job for managers to go around and pull stuff down -especially out of the bathrooms.
Another thing we got a good laugh over was the sudden appearance on the nursing floors of senior managers who were never normally seen there. This led to some good stories. One of the ICU nurses had a comatose patient rolled up on her side wiping feces off her bottom when one of the vice presidents walked in in her nice business suit and dripping jewelry. she said she just wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help. The nurse invited her to put on gloves and lend a hand. She declined.
One thing that was not fun was the "one-on-ones" This is where a manager asks to talk to en employee for a few minutes, takes them into a little room somewhere and sujects them to an ani-union propaganda session. This was worst for the nurses who were genuinely undecided or wanted to keep their voting plans private. Management felt they were persuadable, so they just kept after them relentlessly. People like me, who were totally "out" about our opinions were relatively left alone. Since we were hospital nurses, one of the more disturbing parts of this was that mangement often demanded a nurse leave her patients to undergo one of thise sessions.
Management always likes to maintain an atmosphere of tension and fear during a campaign, so 19 extra security guards were hired. Suddenly we had these big tough looking guys walking around that we didn't know.
Some of their paranoia became downright humorous. One day a nursing student coming in to research her next day's assignment was thrown out of the building because she had a slight superficial resemblance to one of the organizers. Naturally we spread that story around, since anything that made them look dumb was good for us.
I had a job as a patient educator where I could move around fairly freely and was hard to supervise closely, so with a week to go before the election, a totally bogus chart audit was invented and I was consigned to the medical records department in the basement. I still got breaks and lunch though and managed to take them with a different department each day so I dould continue to spread the gospel.
The final straw came with 24 hours before the voting began. That morning, managers were called into a meeting and given copies of two pieces of paper. The supposed story was that they had been "found" in a break room. One of them was supposed to be a letter from a group of pro-union nurses. The other was alledgedly an advance copy of the union victory announcement. Both of them had the same tone, angly, hostile, exalting over our impending victory and vowing revenge against all who had opposed us. The point of course was to make it look like the union and those who supported it were a bunch of angry and vicious hotheads. Fortunately the organizers had warned us to expect something of the sort, so its impact was minimal.
The day of the vote finally came. It was a long, tense day and the count that night was one of the most intense experiences of my life. We won it, 240 to 180. Much alcohol was consumed at the celebration that night.
epilogue: It took 14 months to negotiate our first contract. We recently negotiated our second. CNA - now CNA-NNOC (National Nurses Organizing Committee) has doubled in size since we joined it. We've moved beyond California, representing nurses in Maine and Illinois and with active campaigns in other states. I'm now a member of the executive board.