Nurses group wins fight to join UFT

Pat Arnow GuildNet RNs (from left) Joan Schmidt and Brenda Williams and (from right) Meredith Nicolas and Cassandra Dowling with (center, from left) Renee Setteducato of Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center and Cynthia McDaniel of Manhattan’s Jewish Home and Hospital Home Care, the Federation of Nurses/UFT chapter leaders who helped with their organizing drive.

Federation of Nurses/UFT organizers scored an impressive victory on May 25 when registered nurses at GuildNet, a managed long-term home care operation run by the Jewish Guild for the Blind, voted solidly to join the UFT nurses group.

Despite an anti-union campaign by the employer, GuildNet nurses voted 72 to 22 in a National Labor Relations Board-certified election to form the new 168-nurse bargaining unit. Included are 21 out-of-state telecommuting RNs responsible for record keeping.

“It was an old-time union struggle, which is the only way to fight these days,” said UFT Special Representative Anne Goldman, who headed the organizing effort.

The health care operator, which provides in-home services to blind New Yorkers in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Nassau and Suffolk counties, has a history of treating employees arbitrarily. Among the complaints voiced to union organizers was that management unilaterally stripped new staff members of sick and vacation days.

Goldman said nurses confronted a “pervasively paternalistic organizational culture,” one that zigzagged from playing favorites to hammering critics.

In the process of organizing the new unit, six nurses were fired, Goldman attested. “Management did the best it could to weed out union supporters. They failed,” she said.

Among the union-busting practices: using managers as poll watchers, a potentially chilling practice that is strictly forbidden by federal labor law, Goldman said.

Even that intimidatingly close supervision didn’t stop the nurses from serving as poll watchers themselves for the election, something Goldman found “very exciting in this anti-union climate.”

A bare-bones three-person team mounted the organizing drive: Goldman along with Cynthia McDaniel, chapter chair of Manhattan’s Jewish Home and Hospital Home Care, and Renee Setteducato, chapter chair of Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center.

Asked to explain the team’s success, Goldman replied, “We developed the issues with the nurses, we had a proven track record and we were always available.”

The effort also included quite a few all-nighters, Goldman acknowledged, plus numerous late night, early morning and lunch meetings.

The next hurdle for the new UFT chapter: negotiating a first contract with management.