Pandemic Strain Pushes Some Health Care Workers Toward Unions : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views
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In September, after six months of exhausting work battling the pandemic, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., voted to unionize. The vote passed with 70%, a high margin of victory in a historically anti-union state,
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The nurses had originally filed paperwork to hold this vote in March but were forced to delay it when the pandemic began heating up. And the issues that had driven them toward unionizing were only heightened by the crisis. It raised new, urgent problems too, including struggles to get enough PPE, and inconsistent testing and notification of exposures to COVID-positive patients.
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For months now, front-line health workers across the country have faced a perpetual lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and inconsistent safety measures. Studies show they're more likely to be infected by the coronavirus than the general population, and hundreds have died,
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many hospitals across the country have said worker safety is already their top priority, and unions are taking advantage of a difficult situation to divide staff and management, rather than working together.
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Recognizing that, some workers — like the nurses at Mission Hospital — are forming new unions or thinking about organizing for the first time. Others, who already belong to a union, are taking more active leadership roles, voting to strike, launching public information campaigns and filing lawsuits against employers.
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Labor experts say it's too soon to know if the outrage over working conditions will translate into an increase in union membership, but early indications suggest a small uptick. Of the approximately 1,500 petitions for union representation posted on the National Labor Relations Board website in 2020, 16% appear related to the health care field, up from 14% the previous year.
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Stephanie Felix-Sowy said her team is fielding dozens of calls a month from nonunion workers interested in joining. Not only are nurses and respiratory therapists reaching out, but dietary workers and cleaning staff are as well, including several from rural parts of the state where union representation has traditionally been low.
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Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures, than nonunion facilities.
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The nurses at Mission Hospital say administrators have minimized and disregarded their concerns, often leaving them out of important planning and decision-making in the hospital's COVID-19 response.
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The hospital discouraged them from wearing masks one day and required masks 10 days later. The staff wasn't consistently tested for COVID-19 and often not even notified when exposed to COVID-positive patients.
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the concerns persisted for months. And some nurses said the situation fueled doubts about whether hospital executives were prioritizing staff and patients, or the bottom line.
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Although the nurses didn't vote to unionize until September, Waters said, they began acting collectively from the early days of the pandemic. They drafted a petition and sent a letter to administrators together. When the hospital agreed to provide advanced training on how to use PPE to protect against COVID transmission, it was a small but significant victory
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Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable:
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But with another surge of COVID cases approaching, the nurses decided not to wait any longer to take action