In the aftermath of labor wars at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital

Uncertain future for labor relations at L&M and at Westerly Hospital

By Will Collette

Back to work and trying to get back to normal

During the recent labor-management battle at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital, Progressive Charlestown followed the fight step by step because of the likely impact on Westerly Hospital which was recently bought out by L&M. I figured that as L&M goes, so will Westerly.

The 800 union nurses and health care workers at L&M went through a four-day strike followed by a two-week management lock-out where the primary issue was management’s practice of abolishing union jobs within the hospital by creating new, non-union jobs doing the same work at L&M’s wholly-owned subsidiaries. The union challenged this practice as an illegal unfair labor practice commonly called “double-breasting” and wanted union workers to get the right to follow the work if their job is transferred to a subsidiary.

L&M’s $700,000 a year CEO Bruce Cummings was adamant about not yielding what he saw as a sacred management prerogative. So, reluctantly, the union called the four-day strike to protest the unfair labor practice, but rather than allow the workers to come back after the four days, Cummings ordered them locked out and ran the hospital with a skeleton crew of scabs – temp workers hired from a southern employment agency whose salaries and expenses were three to four times higher than the workers they replaced.

Eventually however, a contract was worked out that management and labor could accept. Less than 20 of the 800 union workers voted no to ratify the contract, although the New London Day reported some grumbling that members had very little time to examine the contract before taking the vote. However, many members were anxious to get the contract done after nearly three weeks on the picket line.

It's tough to go from this back to "normal" with no after effects

Oddly, both labor and management agreed to keep the terms of the contract confidential, and there have been very few leaks, none verified officially by either side. 

According to a New London Day source, the new contract sharply limits the number of jobs management can transfer out of the hospital, gives hospital workers first dibs on those jobs and “much will be done” to make workers whole who have already been laid off by job shifts.

Management concessions in the new contracts were good enough for the union to drop the charges that were being adjudicated before a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge.

The contract also provides for a cost-of-living wage hike and now covers per diem workers as well as salaried employees. Further, the contract establishes a “non-adversarial tone” for on-going unionizing organizing efforts at L&M’s subsidiaries which are currently non-union.

In the days following the contract vote, both sides in the dispute do seem united in wanting to put their bitter conflict behind them and get back to some semblance of normalcy. If you’ve ever been a union member, or worked for one, you know that a strike is the last thing either side wants. For a union, it’s risky business, given how readily management can and will hire strike-breakers. Once a dispute is over, you really want it to be over because it’s in neither side’s self-interest for bad feelings to get in the way of a prosperous workplace.

However, in the hospital industry, the issues at the heart of the L&M battle are serious and unresolved. More and more hospitals are putting the squeeze on their labor costs by cutting back on the number of union jobs, sometimes by simply paring back staff, but sometimes by wholesale shifts through the use of subsidiaries.

The practice of shifting work isn’t just a labor problem. In Pittsburgh, the city is in a battle with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC Group). The city wants to revoke UPMC’s tax-exempt status and collect millions of payroll and property tax dollars.

One of the shocking details emerging from the battle is that although the UPMC Group holds itself to be the parent of 44 distinct subsidiaries that employ more than 52,000 workers, UPMC itself claims it has no employees. In its lawsuit with the city, the UPMC lawyers told the court "The City of Pittsburgh has not, and cannot, identify a single person who is employed by or on the payroll of UPMC, the parent holding company."

UPMC claims that each worker gets a W-2 form not from UPMC, but from the individual subsidiaries. In defending its exemption from property tax, UPMC argues that its properties are almost completely comprised of non-profit hospitals it purchased and rolled up: "These properties were tax exempt when each hospital joined UPMC, they continue to operate as 'institutions of purely public charity' in every sense of the phrase, and they are unquestionably tax exempt. If they are not, then there is no other hospital and clinic in Pittsburgh that would qualify."

The similarities between UPMC and Lawrence & Memorial extend to labor practices as well. At UPMC Altoona, nurses and health technicians staged a one-day protest over management’s unfair labor practices, but when they came in the following day to return to work, they found themselves locked out by management. Management had hired 250 scab nurses to act as strike-breakers.

Whether it’s done on a large scale like Pittsburgh’s UPMC Group, or on a smaller scale like the growing Lawrence & Memorial empire, the practice of using a web of subsidiaries to evade normal legal obligations is a shell game that is hard to stomach.