The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio, August 28, 2006, Monday

Copyright 2006 The Columbus Dispatch
The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News

August 28, 2006 Monday

SECTION: STATE AND REGIONAL NEWS

HEADLINE: On the attack: Seeking new members, union targets hospitals, forcing hospitals to fight back

BYLINE: Suzanne Hoholik, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

BODY:
Aug. 28--The union's reports started last year.
The first came in March and said that uninsured patients in Ohio pay higher rates for hospital care than insured patients. The second, in June, asked whether hospitals provide enough charity care. And in December, the third questioned hospital executives' pay.
Service Employees International Union District 1199 had just fired three shots at Ohio hospitals. And the hospitals are firing back.
"What the SEIU is doing is insidious, destructive behavior that is designed to tear down the institutions they hope to represent," said Mary Yost, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Hospital Association.
The union should have taken its concerns to hospitals before issuing its reports, Yost said. But making its case public to get an upper hand in bargaining with hospital executives is a favorite SEIU tactic.
The nation's largest union wants to grow beyond its 1.8 million members, gain power and change policy in Ohio and across the United States, and hospitals are the place to do that, said Andy Stern, the union's national president.
"Every employer who takes as much money from both individuals and government as (hospitals) do has a responsibility to be accountable," Stern said.
But labor experts say the union reports are designed to sway public opinion and weaken employers long before workers ask to become union members.
"It's not at all unusual to look for ways to gain leverage, including publishing information that calls into question some of (employers') practices," said Robert Hurd, professor of labor studies at Cornell University. "But this kind of thing wouldn't work if the employer wasn't concerned about their public image."
The Ohio Hospital Association said the reports force hospitals to defend their reputations by spending money that otherwise would have gone to patient care.
Yost couldn't put a dollar figure on what hospitals spend defending themselves against the union. "But there's no question in my mind that a lot of time and energy has been spent in trying to determine how we need to respond to these reports," she said.
If hospitals did everything the SEIU wants -- pay taxes and provide more free care to the poor -- the cost of health care in Ohio would increase, she said.
Thinking big
The 28,000-member District 1199 includes Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia. District president Dave Regan wants to add 100,000 members in the next decade.
Today's unions must "think in big, bolder approaches," he said.
These approaches start with Stern. He gained national attention last year when his union left the AFL-CIO. Union membership has declined nationally over the past 50 years, and Stern thought the coalition spent too much money on political races and not enough on recruiting members.
Stern has organized janitors and day-care workers, but more than half of SEIU members are health-care workers in nursing homes and hospitals. The union represents 84,000 nurses in 23 states, including employees at nine Ohio hospitals.
The Ohio Hospital Association said it was caught off guard when District 1199 released its first report a year ago. But it didn't take long for the association to hear from counterparts across the nation who said the union had used the same tactics in California and Connecticut.
"They'll be focused on a single hospital system for about six to seven years, trying to break down defenses," Yost said.
The association distributed pamphlets and e-mails describing the union's tactics to the news media and lawmakers. Association officials told hospitals to get their own story out in the community about free care, community programs and the good work they do.
All four Columbus hospital systems were contacted for this story to describe how unionization would affect operations and patient care, and all declined to comment. Tiffany Himmelreich, a spokeswoman for the hospital association, said the hospitals fear becoming the union's next target.
The current SEIU target in Ohio is Cincinnati-based Catholic Healthcare Partners, the state's largest hospital system. It was singled out in all three of the union's reports.
The hospital system sent a letter to union leaders last year telling them to stop "making further insinuations and halftruths that give others the wrong impression about CHP."
Catholic Healthcare Partners is not anti-union, spokesman Orest Holubec said, pointing out that six of the system's 22 Ohio hospitals have union workers, including nurses at Community Health Partners in Lorain who are SEIU members.
"We're not opposed to unions; we're opposed to the SEIU's tactics," he said. "There is a process for unionization that employees can choose to go through (and that's) the National Labor Relations Board. We respect that process and negotiate in good faith."
Leon Fink, co-author of Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: The History of Hospital Workers Union Local 1199, said hospital executives are leery of unions because they don't want to give up authority over jobs.
"Initially, some employer systems prefer just not having to make compromises or to have to consult with workers," Fink said.
Varying tactics
The union says it has a 70 percent success rate in organizing workers by going to the National Labor Relations Board, but in recent years it and other unions have instead launched campaigns critical of employers in an effort to have executives agree to certain ground rules.
These rules include having the hospital and union review each other's pamphlets before distributing them to workers and getting the hospital to agree to hold only voluntary meetings of employees rather than requiring them to listen to the hospital's viewpoint before they vote on whether to have the union represent them.
The labor-relations board is supposed to enforce such practices, but union leaders and labor experts say the federal agency has become employer-friendly.
"Employers can pretty much say whatever they want to workers," said Cornell's Hurd. "They can do it one-on-one, in groups and create a situation where workers hear one side of the story and not the other."
Said Fink, who is also a professor of labor history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "The penalties are so lax, it pays to basically violate the spirit of the law, which is supposed to give workers rights to representation."
The labor-relations board has been accused of being pro-union or pro-employer depending on which political party controls the White House, said Dave Parker, its deputy executive secretary.
He pointed out that unions won 68 percent of the elections the board oversaw last year.
Nurses at Community Health Partners hospital in Lorain signed their first union contract as SEIU members in 1999. A new three-year deal was signed last week.
Because of a labor-management committee created by the contract, there are now lights in the parking lot used by nurses and a security guard in the emergency-department waiting room, said Beth Zaworksi, an emergency-room nurse.
In the new contract, mandated overtime for nurses is limited to once a month, four hours at a time, she said.
Nurses don't always get breaks because of the demands of their jobs, but they have a better chance of eating lunch most days than they did before signing a contract, she said.
"I wouldn't want a nurse working on me after 16 hours and not being able to get breaks."
Holubec, the hospital system spokesman, said labor contracts add some expenses for things such as arbitration and grievances but not necessarily for wages and benefits.
"We work hard that our employees have a living wage systemwide," he said. "We have to be competitive because health care is a competitive field."
shoholik@dispatch.com
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