Nurses at UW Health have been seeking to unionize for years – since 2019, they’ve been demanding solutions to understaffing and long hours, saying they don’t feel supported by hospital administration.
And throughout a swelling pandemic, they’ve also continued their fight to unionize, being rebuffed by legal challenges under state law.
Now, a new legal memo says that they could be recognized by the UW Health’s board.
The newest memo comes from the state’s nonpartisan legislative council, which advises policymakers on legal and policy research. It finds that the UW Health board is not prevented from recognizing a nurses union – a claim the board has repeated for years.
But that’s a reversal from an earlier memo, also written by the nonpartisan legislative council, which found that that the nurses could not bargain with UW Health.
At the core of the issue: whether or not the nurses can be considered public employees.
After Act Ten was passed in 2011, The UW Hospital and Clinics Board dissolved, and nurses then had to negotiate with the similarly sounding UW Hospital and Clinics Authority, or UWHCA. This meant that UW Health nurses would work for a public body, but were not considered to be state employees. Thus the crux of the issue becomes, are the nurses public or private employees.
The newest memo states that the nurses have two real options. It says that, while UW Health is not mandated to recognize the union, they are still able to recognize the union voluntarily. This is in contrast to the earlier memo sent by the Council in May of this year, which stated that UW Health could not voluntarily recognize the union.
The second option, which is included in the original memo, says that the nurses can seek to “meet and consult” with UWHCA in board meetings to discuss issues they might have.
In a statement made last year, UW Health said they would work to improve two-way communication with staff at the hospital. But nurses say that has not been the case.
Amanda Klinge is a nurse at UW Health.
“…and although we have shared governance and they say we have equal voice, we do not. In fact, there are 9 different instances of shared governance, such as the staffing council, and the staffing council doesn’t even get to make decisions about staffing so that’s not really an equal partnership at all. And if they want us to meet and consult, they haven’t, we’ve been asking for three months now I think to be included in a board meeting and we’ve been denied every time,” Klinge says.
So why the change? After the first memo was sent, the nurses at UW Health turned to Madison law firm Pines Bach, who stated that Act 10 did not prohibit UWHCA from bargaining with its employees, it only removed the obligation to bargain.
After the Pines memo, Senator Melissa Agard urged the Council to take a closer look at the issue.
“I’m not sure that they changed their opinion, (but) that I asked different questions to them and there was clarity provided by them in the new memo. And ultimately, we need to realize that Act 10 passed under Governor Walker, was pretty damaging to the state of Wisconsin in many different avenues, but one of them was the removal of collective bargaining rights for public workers. There’s been a lot of confusion on what that means, seeing as the UW Hospital workers are not directly state employees because of the way the system was set up,” Agard says.
Klinge says labor issues have existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“…so knowing that we faced the impending staffing crisis that the nation faced back in 2018, UW did staffing reduction through attrition, which means they don’t replace nurses as they leave, because they were trying to save money. So that added to the staffing crisis that we’re in now, then you add in the pandemic and wages have decreased also… for new nurses, and it’s not as competitive as other hospitals in the area. It’s really hard to attract new employees so we have unsafe staffing numbers now, which affects our patients, ” Klinge says.
The memo states that employees have a “fundamental right” to self-organize, however those rights may not cover public employees. Thus the question comes down to, are UW Health nurses public employees?
While the memo states that no, the nurses are not public employees and have a right to form a union, UW Health has remained steadfast in their opinion that they legally cannot voluntarily recognize the union. In a statement to WORT today, UW Health reaffirmed their position that Act 10 prevents them from voluntarily recognizing any union.
The UWHCA Board plans to meet on Thursday, and it is unclear whether the board will discuss the union.
Image courtesy: Clay Banks / UNSPLASH
