Feuding in the House of Labor

By Esther Kaplan, The Nation. Posted June 3, 2008.

The biggest union feud since the AFL-CIO split three years ago, some would say, began in Ohio. The way Dave Regan tells it, the Service Employees union (SEIU) first began its effort to organize Catholic hospitals there in the small city of Lorain, just west of Cleveland, in 1999. Regan is president of a union that spans Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, one of SEIU's newly merged megalocals at the heart of the international union's ambitious plans for turning around labor's decline. The 500 or so nurses at the facility faced, he recalls, a "classic, textbook, very intense, very nasty election environment." The hospital hired antiunion consultants and campaigned aggressively against unionization, pulling in nurses for mandatory staff meetings, as well as for intimidating one-on-ones with their supervisors. According to one organizer, nuns serving as hospital administrators even hinted to the nurses that voting union was a sin.

It was a typical kind of hardball, really -- the mix of inside arm-twisting and outside unionbusting expertise that marks four out of every five union votes in this country. Though such campaigns always begin with majority interest, only half result in a union victory, as Regan knows from trying to win traditional labor board elections, shop by shop, for eighteen years in places like eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. "It's incredibly difficult work," he says.

In Lorain, the nurses did vote in the union, by a slim, sixteen-vote margin -- and then, also typically, faced a thirteen-month battle to win their first contract. Along the way, the nurses called two daylong strikes to block the hospital's demand for an open shop; each time, management punished the strikers with four-day suspensions. Through contract fights in subsequent years, Regan says, "we struggled and fought and built an organization that our members there are very proud of"; one nurse, galvanized by the experience, went on to become a state senator.

The hospital in Lorain is part of a Catholic chain that is the largest hospital system in the state. In many places, in the wake of steel mill closures, these hospitals have become the biggest employer in town. "So we started to think about the system as a whole," says Regan, "and we decided to create a campaign the object of which was to secure the right for Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) workers, across the system, to be able to vote on whether to join the union without going through the intense, negative conditions that existed in 1999." What they sought was "employer neutrality," the brass ring of today's large-scale union organizing campaigns, which use corporate campaigns to pressure employers not to fight unionization drives.

By 2004, CHP workers in Springfield, west of Columbus, anxious over a recent merger, were eager to unionize. But the Lorain experience was a bruiser, and another union had run an election at one of the merged facilities and lost badly. Joyce Moscato, who would soon head the statewide campaign for SEIU, urged caution. She met with the workers and talked about what it would take to win fair organizing rules across the state. "They got it," Moscato recalls. "They understood that they could be the leaders in this fight, and they likened it to the civil rights movement." By spring 2005, workers from Catholic hospitals in Youngstown, Toledo, Cincinnati and Lorain sat down with the Springfield workers to craft a statewide campaign for employer neutrality. A hundred of them, from sixteen hospitals, showed up at CHP headquarters to present their demand. They weren't even allowed inside.

What followed was a three-year corporate campaign. SEIU activists mailed out literature about fair unionization rules to elected officials, clergy and advocacy groups. They had hearings before the state legislature. They got community members and hospital workers to sign open letters, held protests over layoffs and wage-and-hour violations, and met with priests and bishops. They issued reports criticizing the chain for inadequate charity care and bloated CEO pay. One former organizer on the campaign, Jim Straub, who recalls living for months in a charmless hotel in Youngstown in 2005, says, "What made this corporate campaign really cool was, we actually organized committees in every damn hospital in the system."

The culmination of this effort was an election slated to take place in mid-March at nine of the system's twenty-one Ohio hospitals, with the possibility that up to 8,300 workers would unionize in the span of a week. The union's public pressure had produced an agreement with CHP for a vote "free from coercion." The employees were informed of the election two weeks in advance by means of a civilized letter, cosigned by CHP and SEIU, a jointly written fact sheet and a broadside from each party arguing, in language so dull as to scarcely be persuasive, for

(SEIU) and against (CHP) the union. Each side set up a toll-free number for questions, and that was that. Neither side would say a word to the workers until after election day. SEIU had taken the concept of neutrality to a whole new level, applying it to the union as well. And the stakes were high. As CHP spokesman Orest Holubec says, if the election had gone smoothly, "it stands to reason that we'd continue the process in other regions."

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Esther Kaplan is investigative editor at The Nation Institute, and author of With God on Their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right.