When it comes to academics, the University of Southern California has stood up to the Trump Administration, but when it comes to its own employees, the university is exploiting Trump’s evisceration of federal labor protections to violate their rights as union workers.
On November 21, NUHW members — including licensed vocational nurses, nursing assistants, housekeepers, medical technicians and respiratory therapists — held an informational picket to demand that the university stop violating their contracts and trampling over federal labor laws that have protected workers for decades.
“USC portrays itself as a beacon of academic freedom while its executives happily take advantage of President Trump’s war on working people to try to bully us into submission,” said Lucy Lamont, an administrative assistant in the Orthopedic Clinic. “We’re not putting up with USC’s hypocrisy, and we’re not going to remain silent while the university refuses to follow the law.”
The picket followed a rally workers held earlier in the month that included a march on the boss demanding that Keck-USC stop violating their rights.
The National Labor Relations Board has been operating without a quorum since President Trump fired a Democratic appointee, limiting its ability to address key labor issues. Last month, the board filed a lawsuit against the State of California seeking to overturn a recently-passed law that would allow California’s Public Employment Relations Board to regulate private sector labor relations when the NLRB lacks a quorum.
NUHW represents 1,800 USC healthcare workers, including caregivers at Keck Hospital of USC, Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, and USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, as well as at Keck-USC call centers and clinics. With the NLRB effectively not functioning, USC has repeatedly violated federal labor law, including:
- Refusing to bargain a contract for workers at the newly unionized Engemann Clinic and slow-walking negotiations at the Mann School of Pharmacy.
- Refusing to meet to settle grievances filed by workers or schedule arbitration hearings.
- Closing the sleep lab at USC-Keck Hospital, where it’s staffed by unionized workers and reopening it at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, where it only agreed to rehire workers as non-union employees.
“USC is engaging in union-busting, and there’s no way they’d be doing it if Donald Trump wasn’t president,” said Sabrina Fausto who works at the Engemann Student Health on the university campus. “We might not have the same protections under the law that we had previously, but we still have each other, and we’re going to do everything in our power to defend our rights because that’s what’s best for our hospitals and our patients.”
