It’s been a hot summer of organizing for NUHW, which has added more than 500 healthcare workers across California over the past two months, all eager to win better salaries and benefits, and improve working conditions so patients can get better care.
Over the past six weeks, NUHW has won five organizing victories, encompassing workers at two hospitals, a county jail, and mental health services in San Diego and San Francisco.
“We’re seeing workers concerned about what’s happening with the federal government and struggling to provide for their families as wages lag,” NUHW New Organizing Director Richard Draper said. “When they see how hard NUHW members have fought for improvements and what they’ve won, it definitely motivates them to reach out to us.”
August started with 117 workers at AHMC Whittier Hospital Medical Center joining NUHW. The workers include respiratory care practitioners, medical technologists, and licensed vocational nurses who followed in the footsteps of 315 caregivers at AHMC Anaheim Regional Medical Center that voted overwhelmingly to join NUHW in July.
Workers at both facilities were inspired by NUHW members at AHMC’s Seton Medical Center in Daly City, where last year workers fought hard to win strong raises and forced management to rescind a new health plan that left many workers struggling to access care close to their homes.
Also in August, 56 workers on the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team voted to unionize with NUHW, as did 15 workers who provide health services for Wellpath at Lake County Jail and 52 mental health therapists and social workers from the Optum San Diego Access and Crisis Line.
San Diego County contracts out its mental health emergency support line to Optum, which in recent years has implemented policies that give therapists less time to prepare and decompress before and after their shifts and less time to take detailed notes about patients who are in crisis, said Louise, a therapist who declined to make her last name public because she works with people who are often having psychiatric emergencies.
“We’ve lost a lot of long-time workers because of the changes,” said Louise, adding that Optum also has begun to prioritize and grade clinicians for not taking breaks on time and adhering to their schedule, even when circumstances are outside of their control — such as being on a call with a person in crisis.
“Unionizing should make a big difference in continuing the kind of care we’re able to give,” she said. “We don’t want to be so hurried and harassed about our productivity metrics. We want to be able to appropriately document each call instead of using a standard template that doesn’t provide the information needed when someone calls the crisis line again.”
The workers in the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team are in a similar situation as those from Optum in San Diego. They serve their county’s most vulnerable residents, but they do it as employees of a company with a county contract, and do not receive the same salaries and benefits as those enjoyed by direct county employees.
“We have a hard job that we love, but we don’t love being exploited by our employer,” said Robin Harmon, a street crisis response specialist. “We’ve seen how mental health workers can improve their lives and provide better care as NUHW members, and we’re ready to do the same.”
Workers told the Bay Area Current that aside from improved benefits, they hope for more power to shape decisions about the services they provide to San Francisco’s unhoused residents.
“There’s so many things that we all love about this work,” case manager Meg Johnson told the publication, “but we don’t have a say in most of what goes down and how we provide care.”
New organizing opportunities are sprouting up throughout the state with several campaigns in motion, especially among mental health workers who have seen NUHW members at Kaiser fight for better access to care as well as more time to get their work done.
“The Kaiser strikes and the resulting contracts have raised NUHW’s profile among mental health workers,” Draper said.
“People are recognizing that this is the place to go where people want to fight employers in the mental health industry.”
