Three months after nearly 500 service and tech workers at Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center San Pedro voted overwhelmingly to form a union with NUHW, 86 of their professional colleagues have followed suit.
The unit, which includes physical, speech, and occupational therapists, social workers, and dietitians voted by a 5:1 margin to join NUHW, rejecting Providence’s anti-union campaign that included captive-audience meetings in which managers tried to dissuade them from organizing.
“I am so proud to join our Providence colleagues in forming a union with NUHW and am looking forward to negotiating for our collective needs and benefits,” said Jenna East, a speech language pathologist. “Finally having a space for the requests and concerns of the employees to be heard is on the horizon. I could not be more excited to spark meaningful action on the behalf of our fellow employees!”
With this latest organizing victory, NUHW now represents nearly 600 workers at Providence San Pedro, a 231-bed hospital near Long Beach. The organizing drive at San Pedro occurred after nearly 600 NUHW members at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center won a transformative contract that increased wages by an average of 40 percent over four years. Overall, NUHW represents more than 3,000 Providence workers, about two-thirds of whom work at five hospitals and a home hospice service in Northern California where workers are uniting to collectively bargain their next union contract.
Providence is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems with 51 hospitals and more than 900 clinics. In recent years, it has been the target of government lawsuits for overcharging low-income patients and then using aggressive collection tactics when they failed to pay. The company has also closed maternity wards and outpatient labs in Northern California to further slash costs, which has impacted job security and put patient care at risk.
