The anti-union playbook.

• Anti-union management consultants advise hospital administrators to go to each nurse and ask for a second chance.

• They make promises that things will improve.

• They give raises, improve benefits, and restore cut-backs.

• They may even fire an unpopular Director of Nursing or CEO, and hire someone new whose job it will be to ask for a second chance.

• Anti-union consultants know that nurses value flexibility. So they’ll make phony threats to take away self-scheduling, weekend programs, anything that makes your life as a nurse easier.

• Just remember, once you’re organized, management can’t make any changes without negotiating with you.

• Management will say that you start with a blank slate at negotiations, and that you could lose benefits that you care about. Remember, you start with what you have now, and work from there in the negotiating process.

• Consider this: if management really thought you would lose by organizing, why are they desperately fighting your attempt to organize?

• Anti-union consultants know that professionalism is important to nurses. So they’ll talk about unions as organizations for blue collar workers, not for educated professionals.

• The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals is a union of nurses, all of whom believe that there’s nothing more professional than being able to advocate for their patients and themselves: at the bedside, at the negotiating table, and before the legislature.

• Anti-union consultants will tell managers to say that the union is a third party that will come between management and nurses.

• Remember, the union is the nurses. Nurses elect their co-workers to be their representatives and all decisions are made by nurses.

• While management never seemed to care how you spent your money before you started talking about organizing, now they’re very concerned about how much you may contribute to your organization in union dues.

• Staff at your facility will pay nothing in dues until a contract has been negotiated and ratified by all the workers in your union. That means that you pay dues only after you’ve voted on a contract that contains the kinds of improvements to salaries, benefits, and working conditions that will make staff want to stay at your facility.

• PASNAP dues are 1.2% of gross wages. Like all decisions in the union, the members voted on these current levels with gradual increases to the cap over time because it is fair and equitable, while providing resources to negotiate great contracts, help other workers organize, and fight for safe staffing legislation

• Only the staff at your hospital can vote to go on strike. While 98% of hospital contracts are settled without a strike, a strike is an option if nurses feel like they have exhausted other options.

• Federal law requires healthcare workers to give a full ten days notice before they strike. At that point, legal responsibility for the care of patients is transferred from the nurses to the hospital. The hospital must make alternative arrangements for the patients, including transferring them to other hospitals and rescheduling elective procedures. Hospitals also hire expensive, out of state companies to provide temporary replacement staff.

• Hospitals like to talk about how little money they’re making. However, staff see ways that money is wasted every day—money that would be better spent on retention and patient care.

• When you’re organized, you have a say in how the money is spent. You also have access to information about the hospital’s real finances and help from union experts to find out where the money is really going.

Management may try to form a “Vote No” committee of staff who will be encouraged to use work time to fight their co-workers’ attempts to organize, all so management can keep things just the way they are now

Management will try to convince staff that simply talking about forming a union is “harassment,” whether it is at work, at a union meeting, or in the privacy of their homes. They know that if staff are able to talk freely and get information, the vast majority will decide to vote yes to form a union. And of course signing a card is the way healthcare workers call for an election. Talking, meeting, and signing are the basic things we do to form our union. Management’s only chance to win is if they can stop people from talking about it, going to meetings, and signing cards. The only real harassment in an organizing drive is done by management—by forcing staff to leave their patients and sit through “mandatory meetings” with professional union busters or managers who have been coached by them.