Staffing, safety concerns prompt HealthEast officers’ union drive

August 13, 2015 by
Kyle McGinn speaks at a press conference outside Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where he works as a security officer.

Kyle McGinn speaks at a press conference outside Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where he works as a security officer. McGinn is a leader in HealthEast officers’ efforts to organize a union.

 

There is safety in numbers and strength in a union. Security officers at HealthEast hospitals are organizing to achieve both.

Officers say they’ve been warning management for years about dangerously low staffing levels among their ranks. HealthEast usually keeps just two security officers on duty at each of its four East Metro hospitals – unless someone calls in sick.

Those concerns fell mostly on deaf ears, officers say, even after nurses at St. John’s Hospital, a HealthEast campus in Maplewood, were brutally assaulted last year. Frustrated, an overwhelming majority of HealthEast’s 45 officers realized organizing a union “is the most effective way to make our voice heard in the workplace,” Bethesda security officer Kyle McGinn said.

“We’ve had violent patients lash out at staff,” McGinn said. “I’ve had gunshots go off and shootings take place within a block of the hospital.

“Security officers want to be able to provide the safest environment possible for patients, families, visitors and other staff members. We feel with the current staffing levels – and the training and equipment we’re given at this moment – we’re not able to do that.”

Bethesda Hospital President Cathy Barr rejects a request from Kyle McGinn (L) that HealthEast recognize a majority of officers' request to form a union.

Bethesda Hospital President Cathy Barr rejects a request from Kyle McGinn (L) that HealthEast accept officers’ petition to form a union.

A public campaign

McGinn and his fellow officers began organizing a union with AFSCME Council 5 earlier this year. Yesterday, backed by elected officials and supporters in the labor community, they visited Bethesda President Catherine Barr’s office to request management recognize their union and engage in a dialogue about their staffing concerns.

After waiting 20 minutes for HealthEast’s director of labor relations to arrive, Barr declined to recognize the union and refused to discuss staffing.

Officers pledged to keep fighting for recognition. But winning a union, Council 5 organizers warned, will require more public pressure on HealthEast than is typically the case during an organizing drive.

That’s because the National Labor Relations Act prohibits security officers and other “guards” from voting to join a union that already represents — or could potentially represent — other workers at the same employer. Because AFSCME Council 5’s 43,000 members statewide include health care workers (although none at Bethesda), the security guards cannot petition for a union election.

HealthEast can recognize the officers’ union voluntarily, however. That’s the approach St. Paul City Council members, Ramsey County commissioners and other elected officials urged the hospital system to take in letters delivered in advance of the officers’ request for recognition.

“These are the people responsible for caring for us,” St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune said at a press conference outside Bethesda. “We would encourage Bethesda to recognize the union and work with the employees. The City of St. Paul works with unions all the time, and it’s considered a positive. I think it will be a positive for Bethesda as well.”

AFSCME Council 5 Executive Director Eliot Seide (R) talks with HealthEast security officers Joe Misencik (L) and Jeff Perry.

AFSCME Council 5 Executive Director Eliot Seide (R) talks with HealthEast security officers Joe Misencik (L) and Jeff Perry.

‘Stick together’

Other HealthEast employees, who rely on security officers to keep them safe at work, agreed with Thune. Members of the Service Employees International Union, the Minnesota Nurses Association and Operating Engineers Local 70 supported the officers’ request.

Nursing assistants Brandon Nagel and Haley Gould stuck around the hospital after finishing the night shift to stand behind officers McGinn, Joe Misencik and Jeff Perry as they delivered the petition to management.

“We constantly have traffic coming in and out,” said Nagel, a steward with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota. “With only one security officer at night, if they’re in the middle of dealing with something, we’re on our own. There are times when I would love to have backup or security (during a behavior emergency), but I’m waiting 10, 15 minutes.”

Council 5 Executive Director Eliot Seide urged officers, “Stick together, hang together and we’ll win together.”

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In negotiations on first contract, North Star Steel dropped anchor

August 1, 2013 by

North Star Steel approached “a new level of absurdity” in an attempt to avoid negotiating a first contract with 30 clerical and sales employees at its Newport facility, The Advocate reported in August 1988.

The workers had voted a year earlier to join the United Steelworkers, but management refused to bargain with the union. After the National Labor Relations Board ruled the company must sit down and negotiate with workers, the company announced plans to appeal the decision.

The Advocate projected the appeal would delay the collective-bargaining process by at least six months, calling it “an example of how the system can be used to stifle the rights of the people it is supposed to protect.”

Steelworkers organizer Mike Denardo put it this way: “They’re delaying us to death.

“With the money they’ve spent on fighting these few workers they could have given them a good first contract with good wages and benefits,” he added.

Unfortunately, the delay tactic lives on among anti-union employers. Look no further than HealthEast, which has been dragging out negotiations with nurses in its Home Care division since they voted to join the Minnesota Nurses Association three years ago. (See story on Page 7.)

North Star Steel dragged its feet into 1990, when the Steelworkers announced plans to target North Star’s parent company, Cargill, with a publicity campaign.

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what the newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

Demonstrators targeted Walker Methodist in August 2003.

Demonstrators targeted Walker Methodist in August 2003.

10 Years Ago: Rally for justice at Walker Methodist

Speaking of employers notorious for stalling… In August 2003, more than 400 people marched down South Bryant Avenue in Minneapolis to a rally outside Walker Methodist Health Center, which dragged out contract negotiations with about 340 AFSCME members for nearly five years.

Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the national AFL-CIO, attended the rally. “If you’re not going to live up to the principles of the Methodist Church, why are you using the Methodist name?” she asked.

It was the beginning of a long contract struggle – one workers finally won in April 2008.

50 Years Ago: Labor leaders, Twins players team to lift spirits in children’s hospitals

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Delegates to the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly joined Twins players in cheering up patients at two Twin Cities children’s hospitals in August 1963. Together, they distributed Twins souvenirs and “Miss Union Maid” dolls (dress, decorated with union labels, included!). From left: Assembly President Charles Rafferty (left) and Secretary-Treasurer E.D. McKinnon at Gillette State Hospital; Margaret Kelly of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers at the Shriners Hospital; and Mrs. Tobey Lapakko, chair of the assembly’s Human Rights Committee, at Gillette Hospital with Twins third baseman Rich Rollins, who “was as big an attraction as the gifts,” The Advocate quipped. “Rollins was still able to hold a bat after developing writer’s cramp autographing each of the Twins yearbooks handed out.”

75 Years Ago: Minimum wage faces legal challenge

A law establishing a minimum wage for working women, passed by the 1938 Minnesota Legislature, drew a swift legal challenge from owners of two businesses, a laundry in Detroit Lakes and a café in New Ulm, who claimed the law “would in effect bankrupt them,” The Union Advocate reported.

The plaintiffs filed suit in federal court, and a three-judge panel heard arguments in August 1938.

A number of “interveners,” including the Western Union Telegraph Company, joined the suit. According to The Advocate, these companies were eager to test the validity of the minimum-wage law, which established a sliding wage scale for women workers ranging from $11 per week in rural areas to $15 per week in cities.

The plaintiffs’ suit alleged the state’s industrial commission, in enforcing a minimum wage, “unlawfully, wrongfully, illegally and arbitrarily . . . deprived the plaintiffs … of their property without due process of law,” and in doing so violated the 14th Amendment.

The Minnesota State Federation of Labor said it would intervene to help uphold the minimum-wage law. Presumably, the federation took issue with the argument that laundry and café workers be considered “property” of their employers.

The justices deferred their decision, but the lawsuit was later withdrawn.

100 Years Ago: Plumbers love a parade

As has become customary in recent years, the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation will sponsor a marching unit in the daily parade through the Minnesota State Fairgrounds on Labor Day this year.

The event draws hundreds of union members from a wide range of RLF affiliate unions, from teachers and nurses to public employees and members of the Building Trades, all marching together behind Labor’s banner.

It’s a family-friendly, positive event, and – as an added perk – it comes with a free ticket to the State Fair for anyone who marches.

One hundred years ago there were no such enticements for union members in St. Paul’s Labor Day parade. In fact, it was less carrot and much more stick.

According to the Aug. 29, 1913, edition of The Advocate, Plumbers Local 34 was so “dead earnest in its determination to make its part of the Labor Day parade a great success” that it threatened members who failed to participate with financial penalty.

“Every member who fails to appear in the line without a reason that is satisfactory to the union will have to pay a fine of $5.”

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HealthEast drags out negotiations with home-care nurses

July 15, 2013 by

mna-logo3-300x300HealthEast is dragging out negotiations on a first contract for nurses in its Home Care division, according to the Minnesota Nurses Association, which is seeking the public’s help in pressuring HealthEast to bargain in good faith.

The MNA, which represents about 65 nurses at HealthEast Home Care, is asking supporters to call or e-mail HealthEast CEO Kathryn Correia (651-232-2300, kgcorreia@healtheast.org) or Director of Labor Relations Mark Sorenson (651-232-5060, msorenson@healtheast.org).

The message, MNA representative Julia Stewart said, is simple: “Quit stalling and give these nurses a contract that’s fair.”

HealthEast Home Care nurses voted to form a union with MNA in April 2010. A year ago they reaffirmed that choice, voting down an attempt to decertify their union.

Despite nurses’ commitment to collective bargaining, HealthEast management has “steadfastly refused even the most typical and basic contract provisions,” Stewart said. That includes language requiring just cause for firing a nurse, and a grievance procedure ending with neutral arbitration.

In an attempt to jump-start negotiations, nurses recently offered to compromise on “several issues fundamental to their day-to-day work life,” like scheduling and workload, Stewart said. Management rejected the offer.

The two sides are meeting with a federal mediator.

By dragging out negotiations on a first contract, HealthEast is taking a page straight out of the playbook for union avoidance – and demonstrating the need for tougher labor laws. A 2009 study by Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner found 52 percent of U.S. workers who succeeded at forming a union remained without a contract one year after their organizing election. Thirty-seven percent still lacked a contract two years after the election.

Employers face no penalty for failing to negotiate a first contract with newly organized workers. Many drag their feet as a result, hoping the longer workers wait to see results from their new union, the more likely they are to support a decertification vote – like the one MNA members fought off at HealthEast Home Care a year ago.

Management’s lethargic approach to negotiations with the new unit of home-care nurses stands in telling contrast to the HealthEast’s most recent round of negotiations with nurses at its Twin Cities hospitals, like St. Joseph’s, St. John’s and Bethesda.

Bargaining alongside other area hospital systems, HealthEast reached a three-year contract with MNA members – and did so about six months ahead of schedule. Hospital executives, Stewart said, emphasized during the negotiations that they wanted to achieve labor peace.

“This doesn’t feel like labor peace to me,” she said.

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UPDATE: Health care workers reach agreement with Twin Cities hospitals

May 16, 2012 by

Ninety-one percent of SEIU members voted to authorize a strike at Twin Cities hospitals. (SEIU Minnesota photo)

SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, the union representing 3,500 health care workers at eight Twin Cities hospitals, announced today it has reached a tentative agreement with management, averting a strike authorized by members earlier this week.

The union said it would withhold details of the proposed contract until union members had reviewed and voted on it. Voting is scheduled for next week.

Tee McClenty, SEIU’s chief negotiator in contract talks with the hospitals, issued the following statement:

While we did not achieve all that our members deserve for the work we do every day to improve our patient’s lives, by standing together we fought back the most outrageous cuts that would have driven the lowest-paid workers in our hospitals into poverty. We will keep organizing and fighting the corporations that want to run our non-profit hospitals like for-profit institutions.

The union resumed negotiations with the eight hospitals Wednesday, armed with the support of an overwhelming majority of its members, who voted May 14 and 15 to authorize their leadership to call a two- to five-day strike if talks did not progress.

Hospitals involved in the negotiations include Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, Fairview Riverside Hospital in Minneapolis, Children’s Hospitals in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Health East’s Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul and St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale, and Park Nicollet/Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park.

Workers in negotiations include nursing assistants, emergency room technicians, maintenance and food service personnel, clerks, warehouse staff and others.

Negotiations between the two sides  broken down, the union said, as a result of the hospitals’ demands for changes in the workday, overtime provisions, vacation and sick-leave. The hospitals also sought large increases in the contribution employees make toward their health insurance coverage. The proposed changes, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota said, would have pushed many of the lowest-paid workers at Twin Cities hospitals – and their families – into poverty.

The hospitals’ insistence on squeezing givebacks out of its lowest-paid employees  angered many workers – as indicated by the strike vote, which drew support from 91 percent of voting members.

“Three years ago when the hospitals were struggling, we agreed to wage freezes so we could all focus on providing the best care possible for our patients,” said Joscelyn Barnes, a bargaining team member and Nursing Assistant at Fairview Southdale Hospital.

“Yet now, when the hospital and CEOs are earning record-breaking profits, the hospital workers that spend each day and night caring for patients are being asked to survive on even less.”

The current hospital contracts expired Feb. 29 and have been extended three times while negotiations continued.

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