MADISON, Wis. — Justin Giebel saw the impacts of Act 10’s union busting in 2011: his father was a teacher.
So when he joined UW Health as a nurse shortly before the pandemic, just as re-unionization efforts began making headway at the company, it wasn’t long before he signed onto the effort.
“It’s been difficult right from the get-go,” he said of working as a trauma ICU nurse as the pandemic was just beginning. “We had to solve a lot of our own problems. There wasn’t, like, a contingency plan or ideas coming from the top down; it was us actually out in the unit saying ‘we need to get these transplant patients out of here.’”
He wants “adequate channels of input” into the decision-making by the leadership in the hospital, saying a decline in quality of care and the respect nurses get has helped the drive towards unionizing.
“My question for [the UW Health board] is what do you have to lose, if you respect us the way that you say you do? If we have the input that you say we do, then why not recognize us?”
RELATED: UW Health says nurses’ plan to strike ‘disappointing’
As hundreds of nurses prepare to strike this September at UW Health in Madison, the system has stood firm in refusing to recognize the union. In a statement released Thursday following a vote of hundreds of nurses on Wednesday night to strike for an “open-ended” three days, UW Health defended its reputation in the health care world and its efforts to improve quality of work for nurses.
“UW Health has been ranked the highest quality hospital in Wisconsin for 11 consecutive years. Our compensation, particularly for nurses, is among the best in the region,” UW Health press secretary Emily Kumlien said in a statement. Citing staffing ratios as “among the best in the nation” and a nursing turnover rate about half the national average, she added the system has added more than 300 nurses to improve vacancies.
“No national advocacy campaign can take away the fact that UW Health is a great place to work with the highest quality care in Wisconsin,” her statement noted.
But one of the unionization drive’s lead organizers, Shari Signer, cites a complete refusal from UW Health CEO Dr. Alan Kaplan to meet with them to hear their demands.
“I’d like the board to know that they need to question why Dr. Alan Kaplan is not listening to his nurses and why he is not willing to meet with us when hundreds of us are saying something’s wrong,” she pointed out.
Core demands ahead of the strike are for UW Health to not retaliate against unionizing employees, to reinstate a fired employee who participated in union organization, and to recognize their SEIU Healthcare union. The SEIU was the group UW nurses belonged to in 2011 when Act 10 first stripped bargaining rights from public employees. The union expired in 2014, as hospital executives had said the law prevented them from recognizing the union.
In 2019, organizers sought to begin bringing that union back. Legal opinions have expressed conflicting viewpoints on whether UW Health can legally recognize the union; UW Health employees are not state employees and the hospital holds a special status with the state despite its connection to the publicly-funded UW System.
This summer, Democratic attorney general Josh Kaul wrote a non-binding legal opinion signaling he believed the hospital could recognize the union, but the system has pointed to memos written by the state legislative council as well as the advice of their own attorneys. His opinion didn’t carry the force of law, however.
“UW Health will not violate the law,” the system said in their statement, pointing nurses to petition the state directly for recognition instead.
“If [Kaul] says we can have this union voluntarily recognized, then we need to go with that opinion,” Signer said. “He is the highest at this level.”
Meanwhile, nurses planning to strike are withholding the exact number — citing only hundreds as participating in the vote. That’s intentional, Signer noted.
“The hospital has to replace all of us. So they’re going to have to get agency nurses to come in and replace every nurse in the building because they won’t know exactly how many nurses are participating,” Signer said.
“I know in some clinics they’re already taking some patients off schedules and trying to move them, and I would assume around that time they would try to move patients out of the hospital. It will 100% disrupt patient care and definitely will impact the patients.”
Other unions who contract with the hospital, such as electricians and plumbers, have signaled their intentions to not cross the picket line while a strike is ongoing, Giebel noted.
“Anytime that nurses are saying, ‘Things aren’t right,’ and we’re stepping away from the bedside because it’s so bad–that’s where we belong, and that’s where we all want to be,” Giebel said. “But if it gets that bad, you know something is really wrong.”
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