c. 1999 Religion News Service
CHICAGO _ A hospital with a name like”St. John’s”may conjure up images of a peaceful, prayerful place where the healing is more than physical. Serenity, though, has lately been in short supply in the fiercely competitive business of health care.
Even religious institutions find themselves bowing to the bottom line. In the lunge to cut costs, they have ignited battles with hospital workers and union organizing drives.
Now, a set of guidelines issued by a national interfaith organization warns the tensions are”likely to escalate”unless unions and religious health-care institutions agree to rules of engagement in the new environment of health care.”There is already serious conflict in these institutions,”said Sister Barbara Pfarr, coordinator of the Religious Employers Project, which released the voluntary guidelines.”With all the changes in health care, workers are feeling threatened. And they’re looking for a voice.” On July 17, nurses at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis voted 697-585 to affiliate with the United Food and Commercial Workers. The union had charged that the pressures of the health-care marketplace were turning St. John’s, one of the area’s largest hospitals, from a”patient-focused”institution into a”profit-focused”one. Management said the union was merely attempting to beef up its membership rolls.
The Service Employees International Union has been waging a difficult drive to unionize nurses, housekeepers and other workers at Catholic Healthcare West, recently ranked by Modern Healthcare magazine as the seventh largest health-care system in the United States.
The National Labor Relations Board has slapped the San Francisco-based hospital network with three complaints for allegedly committing unfair labor practices against pro-union workers. Administrative court hearings begin in September.
Religious hospitals, like their secular counterparts, have generally resisted unionization, fearing higher labor costs and less flexibility, said Pfarr, whose project is part of the Chicago-based National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice.
Pfarr’s group has unveiled a set of”ethical guidelines”aimed at easing what has become an embarrassing dilemma for religious communities that have espoused labor rights but now find themselves in the grips of labor conflict. Twenty-one religious and labor leaders, including several nuns who wield influence in Catholic health care, helped draft the 3,000-word document.
The guidelines exhort both labor and management to assume that each side operates in good faith and”wants the best for both workers and patients.” On a more contentious point, the document urges hospitals to be wary of consulting firms that specialize in keeping workplaces”union free.”Many hospitals hire such firms in the course of union battles.
Historically, religious hospitals have played a vital part in the delivery of health care in the United States. In the recent tumult of hospital mergers and acquisitions, Catholic health-care systems have emerged as dominant in the religious field and stand among the largest systems in the country.
Religious orders of women sponsor the overwhelming majority of Catholic hospitals, though day-to-day running of the institutions has fallen into lay hands as the ranks of sisters have faded.
For some, the record of union relations in Catholic hospitals has become a leading source of worry that the church is failing to practice what it preaches about”economic justice.” The question worked its way into a large Catholic gathering called”Jubilee Justice,”held in Los Angeles July 15-18 to mark the turn of the millennium. Several thousand Catholic activists attended the conference where Msgr. George Higgins, who is widely considered the dean of American Catholic social action, called on Catholic institutions to”set an example by respecting the workers’ voice as our teachings require.” In a July 12 op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Higgins pointed a finger at Catholic Healthcare West, which has fought a union campaign at 10 facilities with 5,000 employees in Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif.
Officials there retort that they respect the right of workers to organize, but that the hospitals also have a right to oppose unionization.
The sisters who legally own the institutions have weighed into this fight, together with lay executives.”A union _ an outside third party whose values greatly differ from ours _ would drive a wedge in the relationship”between workers and employers, said a letter to employees from leaders of the Daughters of Charity, which sponsors several Catholic Healthcare West hospitals.
The National Labor Relations Board says the violations by Catholic Healthcare West include interrogation of workers about their union sympathies and threats to fire leaders of the organizing drive. Catholic Healthcare West vice president Marilyn Morrish said the charges”have no merit.” Sister Mary Mollison, general superior of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Agnes, in Fond du Lac, Wis., said she agrees that unions are”part of the (social) tradition of the church. … I don’t know of any Catholic hospital employer who would say they’re not trying to follow the social teachings.”But when you translate that into real-life situations, it gets murky,”said Mollison, whose community sponsors several hospitals in Wisconsin.
To begin with, some hospital officials say they doubt certain unions understand the realities of health care today.”When you see the Teamsters trying to organize doctors, you have to ask: What do they really know about it?”said Sister Doris Gottemoeller, president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, which represents one of the largest orders of hospital nuns.
In St. Louis, the St. John’s Mercy administration has raised the same doubts about the United Food and Commercial Workers, which typically represents grocery store clerks. But religious hospitals aren’t fighting only unions with relatively few hospital members. Leaders of the 1.2 million-member Service Employees, the nation’s largest and most successful hospital union, say they face resistance nearly every time they try to organize a Catholic hospital.
Pfarr of the interfaith project said many nuns have told her privately that unionization would inflate the costs of doing business and thus make it harder to dispense free care to the poor.
That concern was echoed, and qualified, by Gottemoeller, who until recently served as chairwoman of the Catholic Health Association, the national umbrella group of Catholic hospitals.”If wages and benefits go up, the margin that’s left to support charity care is less,”she said.”On the other hand, some of the poor are these workers (who earn low wages in hospitals). So which poor are you going to support?” On the charity-care point, union leaders cite surveys showing that Catholic hospitals give no more free care to the needy and uninsured than do other nonprofit hospitals.
Despite their qualms about unions, Mollison and Gottemoeller agreed to have their names listed as”advisers”in the new document, titled”Guidelines for Unions and Management in Religiously Sponsored Health Care Institutions.”The two nuns said they hoped the guidelines would jump-start a sorely needed dialogue between labor and management.
The guidelines, though emanating from the pro-union National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, were crafted as a compromise. Lisa Hubbard, spokeswoman for the Service Employees in Los Angeles, said the union welcomes the effort, but had hoped for a stronger set of pro-worker directives.
For example, unions believe the hospitals should never hire management consultants who have a track record of thwarting unions. Stopping short of that, the guidelines say religious institutions should”be attentive”to which firms they hire, and should make sure the consultants’ role is strictly advisory.”I think we have yet to see the right guidelines that really allow workers the freedom to choose”whether to unionize, said Hubbard.”But this moves the discussion absolutely in the right direction.” Pfarr said she suspects the real resistance will come from religious employers that simply don’t want unions in their institutions. She believes, nonetheless, that the guidelines _ if used by unions and hospitals _ could”stem off the worst of the conflict.” Referring to the two sides, she said,”They don’t have to agree on whether there should be unions, but they can agree to ground rules on how to behave decently during union campaigns.” AMB END BOLE
