Corporate Hypocrisy and Appalachian Regional Healthcare

by Tula Connell, Nov 29, 2007

Never underestimate corporate hypocrisy—the kind of in-your-face, no-shame demonstration of Big Business nose-thumbing like that of Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH).

It’s not enough for ARH to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the services of a slick union-busting company to bash its striking nurses in expensive TV ads.

Even as the nurses, members of the United American Nurses (UAN), are entering their 10th week on the picket line, scraping by to feed their families without a job, the hospital chain continues to proudly feature the founder of the original Appalachia hospitals, John L. Lewis, on its website. Lewis, iconic president of the Mine Workers (1920-1960) and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was one of the nation’s best known and toughest union leaders—and not one to take lightly employers’ egregious behavior toward workers. As Lewis famously said:

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, when coal miners and their families in the rural Appalachia region had little recourse to modern medical facilities, Lewis spearheaded the first Miners Memorial Hospital in Middlesboro, Ky. He didn’t stop there, but built additional hospitals in Harlan, Hazard, McDowell, Pikeville, South Williamson and Whitesburg, Ky., with two more in West Virginia and one in Virginia. The union-backed hospitals stepped in where the private sector had refused to go—and gave entire communities access to quality health care.

Earlier this fall, after nearly 700 nurses were unable to secure a contract to improve patient care at ARH facilities, they went out on strike. ARH then hired permanent replacement workers—providing them living quarters in vacant wings of the hospitals. Nurses are surviving through the help of their union and the entire union family, which is gathering donations. Once again, it’s not Big Business that’s extending a helping hand.

It’s possible to presume that in featuring a photo and background of Lewis as hospital founder, ARH wants to perpetuate the corporate myth that unions were great “way back when”—that is, so the corporate mantra goes, when workers really needed a voice at work.

But by its actions, ARH proves employers haven’t changed much since the times Lewis and other mine workers battled head-busting union busters. Yessin & Associates, the union-busting firm ARH employs, offers its clients videos on “strike violence” employers can show employees to scare them (with much of the violence that’s depicted perpetrated by law enforcement agencies). Yessin & Associates is but a small part of the so-called “union avoidance” industry—a multibillion-dollar industry involving more than 2,500 lawyers. And by its blatant disregard for workers’ concern over patient care, ARH highlights how critical unions are today for workers—and consumers—whether white-collar health care workers or coal miners like those at the nonunion Canyon Creek and Sago mines, as they face a 21st century version of the type of corporate intimidation John L. Lewis would easily recognize.

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