Baltimore nurses picket Catholic bishops conference

RNs at Ascension Health Care’s St. Agnes Hospital cheer last November after winning their union recognition vote to join National Nurses United. One year later, they’re picketing the U.S. Catholic Bishops conference to get the prelates to push St. Agnes bosses to bargain in good faith. | National Nurses United

BALTIMORE—Short-staffing, low pay and the resulting revolving door of registered nurses joining and then leaving Ascension Health Care’s St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore led RNs there to take their case to the ultimate authority over the Ascension chain: The nation’s Catholic bishops.

So when the prelates came to their annual conference on November 20, this year at the Marriott Hotel in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, marching nurses, members of National Nurses United, met them while wielding informational picket signs.

The St. Agnes nurses demanded the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops push Ascension’s bosses into bargaining in good faith. NNU nurses recently won first contracts at two other Ascension hospitals, one in anti-union Texas. The bishops had no recorded reply, news reports show.

The bishops’ silence is not new when it comes to union organizing drives, and not just among nurses.

They were silent when Catholic-run universities, led by Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, argued to the U.S. Supreme Court the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment freedom of religion clause exempts Catholic institutions from labor laws.

And when nurses at Chicago’s Catholic-run Resurrection health care system campaigned to unionize with AFSCME more than a decade ago, the Resurrection board found myriad ways to stymie them. The bishops were silent. The archdiocese of St. Louis resisted a long-ago Carpenters effort to unionize teachers and staff at the city’s parochial schools.

St. Agnes’s RNs unionized with NNU via its National Nurses Organizing Committee last November 3 by a 223-203 margin, National Labor Relations Board records show. NNU now represents some 600 RNs there, up from 522 at the time of the balloting.

Bargaining has been slow

Bargaining with the hospital’s bosses has been slow since it began in February. The St. Agnes RNs say that besides not budging on low pay, safe staffing, service cuts and protections from lawsuits for billing disputes, the hospital violates church doctrine, and disregards the church’s own extensive manual for Catholic hospital managers. And they’re right.

On many of those grounds, notably the right to organize and bargain collectively, St. Agnes fails its nurses, its patients and the pro-worker Catholic Social Teaching encyclical by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.

And the seventh summary paragraph, out of dozens, in the church’s manual for its hospital administrators opens: “A Catholic health care institution must treat its employees respectfully and justly.” That mandate of administrators’ action ends by saying that includes “recognition of the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively without prejudice to the common good.”

The St. Agnes RNs were less lofty than the manual is. They’re concerned about having enough nurses to properly care for all of their patients.

“In ICU, we usually do one nurse for every two patients,” intensive care RN Melissa LaRue told public radio station WYPR. “St. Agnes has been cutting that and at times we’ve had to take care of three patients instead of two. We feel like we’re being put in unsafe situations for our patients.”

Ascension, a chain of 140 hospitals nationally, cut staff so sharply, in Baltimore and elsewhere, that it wound up on this year’s Dirty Dozen list of worst safety and health violators, compiled by the labor-backed National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. It also shut a fourth of its labor and delivery units, NACOSH said, with disproportionate impact on poor patients and communities of color.

“It’s no surprise to union nurses Ascension is on the ‘Dirty Dozen’ list after seeing management trying, and failing, to bust our union and squash our attempts to improve patient care conditions,” St. Agnes neonatal ICU Registered Nurse Nicki Horvat told NACOSH earlier this year.

“We hope this is a wake-up call to regulators, who need to investigate how Ascension takes advantage of its tax-exempt status to maximize profits at the expense of the communities it should be prioritizing.”

But not all is sweetness and solidarity among the St. Agnes nurses, either.

The venal, vicious, corporate-controlled National Right To Work Committee is aiding a group of dissident RNs to demand the National Labor Relations Board to call a decertification vote to oust the union, precisely a year after NLRB certified it. Labor law allows that decert drive.

St. Agnes RN Robin Buckner provided the public radio station with a sharp response: “We, the nurses, are our union. We voted to unionize, and our bargaining team is at the negotiating table with management fighting for a strong first contract. We unionized to have a voice at our hospital, not to be silenced by management or their buddies at third-party, anti-union organizations.”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.