A Des Moines hospital chain has been refusing to recognize its nurses union for six months. Nurses are fed up and holding a rally to protest June 8.
Belinda Carpenter, a registered nurse who works at three of the four UnityPoint hospitals where nurses voted to unionize last year, is fed up with her employer.
“They’ve had to waste millions of dollars to try to stop us,” she told Iowa Starting Line. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
Nearly 1,800 nurses voted to unionize with United Nurses of Iowa last year and it wasn’t even close: Unofficial results show nurses won their union, 871-666.
It’s “unofficial” because, six months later, UnityPoint is still fighting the results.
The company has challenged 250 ballots, leaving the case stuck at the National Labor Relations Board, which has become purposefully understaffed.
And according to nurses, that’s just the latest attempt to stop them.
The company has spent millions on anti-union consultants since the beginning to try to convince workers they don’t need to have a say in their workplace.
And the nurses are sick of it.
“It’s just very hypocritical for our organization to claim nonprofit status, yet have money to pay off union busters to scare and intimidate nurses and not come and reinvest in the community or their staff,” Carpenter said. “It made me very angry to see that.”
For nurses like Carpenter, the fight for a union started because of concerns about staffing and patient safety.
“I’m running around and have very, very sick patients that needed my one-to-one attention that I could not give them because I had several other patients that were also ill,” she said.
“It just seems like we’re just putting out fires the entire time and trying to do our best,” she continued. “We have told administration all these things, and nothing really changes. We need accountability for them, and a union and a contract is the way that we can do that.”
Until United Nurses of Iowa, a Teamsters Local 90 union, is certified, nurses can’t bargain for that contract.
“They’re taking advantage of the fact that the NLRB is backlogged,” Carpenter said. “We’re just in this awful limbo.”
And, Carpenter said, the company is using that delay to get rid of union backers.
“Of course, they’re not outright saying it,” she noted. “But when our staffing is low and you have people that are wanting to maybe cut their hours down, they’re being told they cannot, they’re pushing people away that would be willing to stay.”
Now, the nurses are taking their fight to the Iowa State Capitol.
On June 8, United Nurses is holding a rally in Des Moines before marching to UnityPoint Methodist Hospital. The public is invited to join.
“It’s a way for us to just apply pressure to the hospital and make them aware that we are still here, we’re not going anywhere, and that they should do the right thing and just work with us,” she said. “Because, ultimately, we want to just be better able to take care of patients and just continue to do our jobs to the best of our ability.”
And the rally is a way United Nurses of Iowa can show their strength as a union—certified or not.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Carpenter said. “We’re not giving up. We’re going to be here. We’re going to still continue to advocate. I think that taking on a bunch of nurses has proven challenging for [UnityPoint].”
