California's Kaiser vote gives healthcare unions a chance to rejoice - and worry

As hospitals struggle to balance the need for more workers with an economy that makes hiring them very difficult, a bitter union battle that played out over the past year in California has many wondering about the evolution of healthcare unions.

In October, by a vote of roughly 18,000 to 11,000, Kaiser Permanente employees opted to keep their membership in the Service Employees International Union, a Washington, D.C.-based organization of roughly 2.2 million members, about half of which are in healthcare. The vote was a stinging rebuke to the upstart National Union of Healthcare Workers, a 6,000-member, Oakland-based union that was formed in 2009 by disgruntled SEIU members.

NUHW members charged SEIU with favoritism in filling management positions and failing to represent the needs of the rank-and-file healthcare employee. SEIU officials, on the other hand, pointed out that several of the upstart unions leaders – including NUHW President Sal Rosselli – had been kicked out of the SEIU for misusing union funds and violating members’ democratic rights.

Some union analysts had suggested the vote would put an end to the NUHW, but officials met on the weekend following the vote and vowed to continue organizing. And in November, they scored a victory when about 1,500 Kaiser mental health professionals voted to leave the SEIU for the NUHW. That group will join some 2,300 psychologists, social workers, dieticians, audiologists, speech pathologists, health educators and nurses in Kaiser’s southern California sites who voted to switch unions last January.

“This is a victory for democracy. Now we will have a real voice regarding issues of patient care, staffing and workload,” said Spencer Gross, a psychologist at Kaiser Pleasanton for 23 years.

According to the online publication LaborPains, the final tally in Kaiser’s 47,500-strong California healthcare workforce is 43,000 for the SEIU and 4,300 for the NUHW.

While analysts decried the battle for Kaiser’s workers as bad for unions in general, many agreed that nurses’ unions have a relatively positive image with the public, who might look favorably on their efforts to improve the healthcare workplace.

That may have helped California’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Jerry Brown, defeat Republican nominee Meg Whitman in the November election. Brown had the backing of the 85,000-member California Nurses Association, which campaigned often for Brown and sometimes dressed up an actress as Whitman to parody her healthcare platform.

The CNA, affiliated with the National Nurses United national union, battled outgoing California Gov. Arnold Schwarzennegger on several fronts, earlier helping to defeat the governor’s slate of reform measures that would have curbed union influence. CNA officials have said they will work with the new governor to improve conditions for nurses in the state, including enforcing staffing ratios and other workplace rules.

At a time when qualified nurses and other healthcare employees are a dwindling commodity, with shortages anticipated well into the next decade, hospital administrators have to be ready to deal with unions. At the annual conference of the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, held in October in Tampa, Fla., labor experts pointed out that healthcare unions won 70 percent of the unionization votes held last year, with many campaigning on promises of better working conditions.