Nurses Decry Multitude of Sins at Union-Busting Catholic Hospitals

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2010/07/nurses-decry-multitude-sins-union-busting-catholic-hospitals

Nurses Decry Multitude of Sins at Union-Busting Catholic Hospitals

by Jane Slaughter | Thu, 07/15/2010 - 5:12pm

Less than 6 percent of Ascension Health’s 110,000 workers are union members, but apparently that’s 6 percent too many for the country’s largest Catholic health system. Management is on a concerted campaign to bust unions at its hospitals in Michigan, say the Teamsters, the Michigan Nurses Association, and their ally Interfaith Worker Justice, a national organization that works with religious leaders.

IWJ Executive Director Kim Bobo called Ascension’s sins “a fall from grace.” RN Tiffany McDonald, a Teamster, said “the whole culture is gone” at Genesys Medical Center in Grand Blanc, near Flint, since Ascension brought in a new CEO.

The 300 technicians at Genesys had been bargaining a new contract since December, until management walked away three weeks ago and refused to bargain further. Their “last and final” offer included changing licensed practical nurses’ title to “technician” and cutting their pay by up to $7 an hour, and getting rid of defined-benefit pensions. Payments to the pension fund would decline from an average of $6,240 per year to $1,620, and pensions would be cut by at least 75 percent, which “does not seem to fit with Ascension’s claims that it is dedicated to a compassionate and just society,” said the report issued today by IWJ.
UNION-BUSTING IN KALAMAZOO

IWJ had put together a delegation to interview workers from three Ascension hospitals in Michigan. They found egregious union-busting at Borgess Medical Center in Kalamazoo, where RNs had won fixed nurse-to-patients ratios in their last contract three years ago. But, said Karen Mitchell, vice president of the Michigan Nurses Association’s 700-member unit there, management soon took advantage of an escape clause that mentioned “extreme circumstances” to begin violating the ratios.

FULL story at link.