Organizing not a threat to our medical center

I’ve worked at Eastern Maine Medical Center for 27 years. I love my work here, and am proud of the care we all give to our patients. I appreciate how I personally have been treated as an employee, and am grateful for the gift this hospital is to our community. But it has been upsetting to me to watch how my hospital administration has responded to some employees’ interest in creating another bargaining unit in addition to the nursing union.

In her May 8 op-ed, EMMC CEO Deborah Carey Johnson tells us that unions may have had their place at the turn of the 20th century. Then she offers a cheerful departure from the view of mainstream labor analysts that what has hurt unions most has been outsourcing manufacturing jobs by the millions, and the relocation of formerly unionized companies to areas where there is a low- paid and vulnerable work force.

Instead, she explains, the decline of union membership can be primarily ascribed to better laws and to the enlightened personnel policies of institutions like EMMC. Since there aren’t any significant labor issues at EMMC, she suggests, a union is now “pursuing” a thousand employees at EMMC “to help ensure [its] own future survival.”

This assertion both misrepresents what unions do and patronizes the secretaries, nursing techs, schedulers, housekeepers, cafeteria and laundry workers, transporters, and others in a prospective bargaining unit. These thousand people are perfectly capable of deciding on their own whether or not they are subject to labor practices that should make them desire the protection of collective bargaining.

All of us should appreciate that being a hospital administrator in the 21st century is not a piece of cake. Health care institutions are caught in the squeeze between rising healthcare costs, decreasing reimbursements, a health care insurance crisis,

government constraints, the welfare of its workforce, and the vision to provide the best possible care for all the patients who come to our facility. Some of these factors obviously run at cross-purposes.

So it is natural for our CEO and hospital administration team to want the most flexibility it can obtain in what it can ask, sometimes insist, of its employees. But as anyone who is part of an increasingly “flexible” workforce appreciates, it is also understandable for employees to desire some recourse when top-down decisions feel excessively unfair, or bad for patient care.

To have those feelings and desires means neither that employees desire to micromanage, nor sabotage, their workplace. It just means that from time to time it’s nice to have a voice at the table to which the administration doesn’t feel free to turn a deaf ear.

This shouldn’t be a foreign concept at EMMC: It’s apparent to most that the contracts EMMC nurses have been able to negotiate with the hospital through the Maine State Nursing Association have set benchmarks which have benefited EMMC’s nonunion employees as well, in terms of health insurance and retirement benefits.

It’s also been clear that nursing union negotiators have advocated not just for nursing benefits but for staffing requirements which nurses believe protect the safety and

well-being of our patients. Taking the best possible care of our patients at EMMC is everybody’s paramount concern here, whether we’re in or out of a bargaining unit, in or out of hospital administration.

Johnson warns that those involved in union organizing at EMMC are engaged in a strategy to discredit the medical center, a “tactic often used by unions targeting an organization that cherishes its reputation.” Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard of CEO’s to conflate criticism of their administrations with lack of devotion to the institution. But it upsets me to see people committed to collective bargaining, some of whom are risking their jobs, portrayed as trying to tear down our hospital. From what I know, what I hear, and what I have read in the pages of the Bangor Daily News, those involved in this effort regard EMMC as a tremendous boon to our community, and are proud to be a part of it.

Why do I say that employees might be risking their jobs?

I and virtually every other employee at EMMC have attended a number of mandatory employee forums led by Johnson. During these informational sessions, one recurring theme has been that employee attitudes are critical to the success of the hospital, and that employees with “negative attitudes” corrode the morale and effectiveness of us all. Such employees, she has told us, will be identified by EMMC managers, who will make it plain that if their attitudes don’t improve, they should consider other employment.

While the chapter and verse of just what constitutes a bad attitude has never been made completely explicit, more than once these sessions have ended with our chief executive officer letting us know that her greatest disappointment has been the presence of union organizing activity at EMMC.

I don’t know whether this implied threat violates accepted labor practice or not. But to claim an environment in which “EMMC supports employees’ right to choose or not choose to be represented by a union” doesn’t pass the straight face test. Ironically, it underscores the reasons why some employees might feel the need to join a union.

Dennis Chinoy has worked as a physician assistant at EMMC since 1978.