A UNION WINS ONE

By Staff
Texas Observer
April 18, 2008

The National Nurses Organizing Committee, née the California Nurses Association, broke through an important barrier last month. On March 28, a majority of participating nurses at the Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center voted to let the union negotiate a contract on their behalf, making the Houston facility the first privately owned hospital in the state to unionize.

Cypress Fairbanks is owned by scandal-plagued Tenet Healthcare Corp. The Dallas-based company has been on an upswing after years of government investigations and lawsuits, including one that resulted in a $900 million settlement with the Justice Department in June 2006. Private hospitals are notoriously hard to organize. Tenet has refused to comment publicly on the union vote, but in a written statement said it was disappointed, according to the Houston Chronicle. The company owns two other hospitals in Harris County.

The California nurses have had a rocky road to victory in Texas. Their first foray here involved a high-profile effort to pass legislation mandating higher nurse-patient ratios. Their bill didn’t get a hearing. Then the group was publicly rebuked this past January at the AFL-CIO state convention. Delegates approved a resolution that contained language by AFSCME that chided the California committee for trying to poach nurses the larger union represented at public healthcare facilities in Houston.

In an e-mail, organizing committee coordinator Ed Bruno wrote that the union has been working to expand to hospitals throughout Texas since 2006. “NNOC organizing today is for all practical purposes statewide and includes RN organizations from El Paso east to the Gulf and Dallas south to the Valley,” Bruno wrote. Come next legislative session, the union plans to re-introduce its hospital patient protection act, according to Bruno. Now that the union officially represents Texas nurses, it might have more luck.

Regardless, oft-beleaguered Lone Star union leaders were thrilled by the victory. “The vote shows that despite exceptionally difficult conditions for organizing in any so-called ‘right-to-work’ state, it can be done in Texas,” said Becky Moeller, Texas AFL-CIO president.