Court Ruling Seen as Setback for Unions in Nursing Field : Labor: The legal definition of a supervisor could thin ranks of locals and affect outcomes of some organizing elections.

Union organizing in the nursing field--one of the few industries in which organized labor has made deeper inroads in recent years--has been dealt a serious setback by a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling, labor law experts said Tuesday.

Some critics of the high court’s decision Monday also argue that, if the ruling is broadly applied by lower courts, it could chill union organizing and cooperative labor-management programs in other industries.

The fundamental legal issue in the case involves defining who is a supervisor versus a non-supervisory employee. The question is pivotal in some labor disputes because supervisors are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that protects union activities and “concerted” actions by groups of non-supervisory employees.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling stems from a complaint filed by three nurses who were fired in 1989 after protesting working conditions at their Urbana, Ohio, nursing home. They challenged their employer’s action, arguing that their protest was a “protected concerted activity” safeguarded by the NLRA for non-supervisory employees.

The National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that rules on labor disputes, unanimously decided in the nurses’ favor. The agency hewed to its longstanding view that nurses who make work assignments and exercise independent judgment can still be considered non-supervisory workers.

But an appeal by the employer, the Health Care & Retirement Corp. of America, eventually brought the case to the Supreme Court. In its 5-4 ruling, the high court rejected the NLRB’s stance, declaring that nurses who direct lower-level aides were supervisors and therefore could be fired for protesting job conditions.

“We are especially concerned about this ruling as it comes at a time of great cost-cutting in the health care industry,” said Virginia Trotter Betts, president of the American Nurses Assn. “Now is not the time to tell the front-line care-givers in hospitals that they can be fired for complaining about management decisions that are detrimental to patient care.”

Lawyers said the ruling, however, does not prevent supervisors from suing for wrongful dismissal under other labor laws.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, downplayed the notion that the ruling would have broad impact outside of nursing. “Any parade of horribles about the meaning of this decision for employees in other industries is thus quite misplaced,” he said.

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the dissenting opinion, warned that the ruling could deny the protection of the NLRA to all but a few professionals in the workplace.

Labor and management groups divided along similar lines in their assessment of the ruling, but both sides agreed it would narrow the number of nurses eligible for union membership.

Recently, hospitals and nursing homes have been fertile territory for nursing unions. For example, the California Nurses Assn., the state’s largest nursing union, has grown by 6,000 since 1989 to more than 25,000 members today.

The association represents mostly nurses working in private hospitals. Nurses in public health facilities, such as those run by the University of California system, are governed by separate state and local laws of collective bargaining.

But the public sector usually follows the private sector’s lead, said James Eggleston, an Oakland lawyer who represents the California Nurses Assn.

“It’s the persuasive effect of longstanding practice,” Eggleston said. “The public sector usually follows NLRA precedent.”

In California, organizing efforts have often bent against the supervisor issue.

At Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, the issue delayed a union election by 10 months, which gave the hospital owners time to conduct an anti-union campaign, said Pat McCarthy, a Los Angeles-based labor representative for the California Nurses Assn.

At Desert Hospital in Palm Springs, a 1990 union election lost by four votes. In the three years before the next election, McCarthy said, the hospital moved nearly 40 employees into the classification of “clinical managers,” and then argued that they were supervisors and not part of the nurses bargaining unit.

That election was won by the union--by one vote. However, Desert Hospital has challenged the outcome, McCarthy said, and the NLRB in Washington is looking into the ballot procedure.

Times staff writer Anne Michaud in Orange County contributed to this story.