Employees at Providence Tarzana Medical Center voted recently to leave the Service Employees International Union and join the National Union of Healthcare Workers.
The count at the Tarzana, Calif.-based hospital was 282 votes for the NUHW and 69 for the SEIU. Thirty-eight workers voted to have no union.
“We’re thrilled to have won this election and put our union back under members’ control,” said Julie Sidrow-Thompson, a monitor tech at the hospital. “For a year and a half, SEIU has stood in our way and left us without a voice. Now that we’re united again in NUHW, we’ll have the strength we need to stand up for our patients and ourselves.”
Providence is the second Catholic hospital system to align with the NUHW, following St. Joseph Health System workers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital last year.
About 13,000 employees at Catholic Healthcare West – the largest non-profit healthcare provider in California – recently began collecting signatures to call for their own election to join NUHW. Workers there are eligible to change unions next year.
The National Labor Relations Board could also set a date soon for 45,000 Kaiser Permanente workers to vote in the biggest private sector union election since the 1940s.
The NUHW is the fastest-growing union in California. It was created last year by former SEIU executives who charged the Washington, D.C.-based SEIU, which boasts 2.2 million members, with taking over California’s healthcare union, forcing healthcare workers from elected positions and putting themselves in charge. Dozens of healthcare workers immediately voted to establish NUHW as a new, independent union.
NUHW officials say workers at more than 360 facilities have petitioned to join NUHW in the last 15 months.
SEIU officials, meanwhile, have won three court battles against the upstart union, including a $1.57 million judgment against 16 former SEIU officials who were charged with trying to sabotage the SEIU while launching the NUHW. NUHW officials have also been accused of maintaining control of an SEIU education fund after their departure and committing several indiscretions while holding elected offices in the SEIU.