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Ruling Vindicates Yale-New Haven Workers, Shows Ugly Employer Tactics |
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For the first time in a decade, a group of nurses aides, housekeepers, secretaries and other service workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University’s teaching hospital, have something to celebrate.
Their struggle exposes how employers use union-busting tactics even after it has specifically agreed to a standard of conduct. And it shows how much we need the Employee Free Choice Act so workers can have a real choice.
Ray Abernathy reports on RayAbernathy.com about how the workers have fought for 10 years for a voice on the job with SEIU 1199 New England, despite a virulent anti-union campaign orchestrated by the hospital and its team of union-busting consultants. SEIU 1199 New England is affiliated with the Connecticut AFL-CIO and the Greater New Haven Labor Council.
Even though they don’t yet have a union, Margaret Kern, an independent arbitrator jointly selected by the hospital and the union, ordered the hospital to pay each worker about $1,200, a total of $4.5 million in damages to the workers and the union. Of that total, $2.3 million compensates the union for election expenses, and $2.2 million will be divided equally among the 1,736 Yale-New Haven employees who were eligible to vote in an election Kern says was destroyed by the hospital’s multiple labor law violations.
The amount awarded to the workers matches exactly the amount the hospital paid to anti-union IRI Consultants to thwart the workers’ effort to join a union.
In her ruling, Kern points out that from June to December 2006, the employer and consultants conducted 98 mandatory meetings on work time, completely ignoring an agreement on election principles.
According to Kern, there was strong evidence that the consultants were keeping a running count of the workers’ leanings and that the violations were not the work of a “few rogue managers.” Instead, Kern said:
The employer’s conduct here was a methodical dismantling of the terms and commitments of the election principles agreement.
Kern found that Yale-New Haven threatened workers with a loss of wages, scheduling flexibility, wage differentials, onerous working conditions and even a loss of employment if they joined the union. She noted that the employer had settled a National Labor Relations Board complaint involving this same misconduct, resulting in a board order that Yale-New Haven cease and desist from engaging in such conduct in the future.
Click here to read the entire report.
In a newspaper ad, the workers say the best way to correct situations like the one they face is to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field and allow workers to decide how they want to choose a union.
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