Catholics Split Over Union’s Hospital Drive

A nasty battle of wills between three local Catholic medical centers and an aggressive union has ignited a passionate debate among national and local clergy about the church’s role in dealing with labor disputes in its own backyard.

The clash between Catholic Healthcare West, which is operated by nine orders of nuns, and the Service Employees International Union is among the most contentious in a growing number of disputes between Catholic-run health care facilities and labor organizations.

It puts what has become a standard management response to an organizing drive--hiring consultants who specialize in defeating unions--under the scrutiny of church doctrine, which historically has been pro-labor.

“The teachings in the church documents are quite clear,” said Msgr. George G. Higgins, a respected Catholic leader who served as labor consultant to the nation’s bishops for more than 45 years. “Workers have a right to organize. If they’re hiring a firm that is anti-union, then the sisters are wrong.”

Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical in 1992 saying unions are “indispensable.”

Some church leaders are troubled by allegations that managers at the three hospitals--St. Francis in Lynwood, Robert F. Kennedy in Hawthorne and St. Vincent in Los Angeles--have used religious authority to dissuade workers from joining a union. In separate letters to employees at Kennedy and St. Francis, three sisters and a chaplain argued that a union would interfere with the hospital’s mission and drive a wedge between workers and supervisors.

Bernita McTernan, a Catholic Healthcare West senior vice president, said that there was no systematic effort to pressure workers and that the company was merely trying to ensure that employees had balanced information before voting on forming a union.

McTernan said 30% of the company’s employees belong to labor unions. Just last year, registered nurses at St. Vincent Medical Center voted to join the California Nurses Assn.

The dispute will get a very public airing this weekend, as 3,000 church activists converge on Los Angeles for the National Catholic Gathering for Jubilee Justice, the largest meeting addressing social justice in the history of the church.

Some Clergy Members Plan Silent Protest

The four-day event will take aim at the health care conflict. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney is set to join Mgsr. Higgins at a breakfast today to honor the church’s “history of support for organized labor.” Some clergy members have said they will wear pro-union buttons in a silent protest.

“I’m kind of amazed [the hospitals] would be so vehement in their anti-union stance,” said Gary Smith, a former priest who is now policy director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “These orders [of nuns] were very strong in their support of the farm workers, but now that it comes to their own employees, they seem to have abdicated their responsibility.”

But Sister Jannine Percy, the health care company’s vice president for governance, placed at least part of the blame for the tension on the union, which has targeted hospitals in a national organizing drive.

“This is a corporate campaign,” she said. “SEIU would like us to say, ‘Yes, just step right in and unionize.’ But that would not be respectful of the employees.”

Union votes are pending or have recently been held at close to a dozen Catholic hospitals, from Florida to Washington state. Although not all the campaigns have been acrimonious, the trend has prompted the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington to develop guidelines for handling labor-management disputes at church-owned health care institutions, a church official said.

The soul-searching comes at a time of wrenching change in health care, marked by consolidations and staffing reductions that have put hospital workers on edge and made them more receptive to labor unions.

About 10% of all U.S. hospitals are Catholic. With 48 facilities, including 14 in Southern California, San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West ranks as the third-largest Catholic hospital system in the country, according to a recent survey by Modern Healthcare, an industry weekly.

The Catholic Church has a history of support for organized labor, dating from the writings of Pope Leo XIII in 1891.

But activists say church teachings are ignored when the institution is a Catholic hospital. Notre Dame Sister Barbara Pfarr, a Chicago nun who is coordinator of the Religious Employers’ Project of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, said that for decades, organizing efforts at Catholic hospitals have been met with strong anti-union campaigns.

“Religious institutions consider their work a ministry, and they feel unions aren’t compatible with their mission,” Pfarr said. “Because of that, there is a demonization of unions and everyone involved with unions.”

Catholic Healthcare West was founded in 1986 when the Sisters of Mercy of Auburn and Burlingame, Calif., merged 12 facilities in this state and Arizona. In 1988, the Adrian Dominican sisters joined, followed shortly by six other orders.

The system’s growth surged in 1989 after the sisters hired a team of corporate managers, headed by President and CEO Richard J. Kramer. Although sisters oversee the company, daily operations are run by lay management.

Hospital Chain Called an Extended Family

The company’s managers like to describe their system of 48 hospitals as an extended family, in which workers are “associates” and business decisions are guided by values such as respect, dignity and advocacy for the poor.

But several longtime employees say that as the firm grew, it became more corporate and less Catholic, losing its connection to workers.

“It’s not the money, it’s the lack of help we get to care for our patients,” said Guadalupe Moore, a licensed vocational nurse who has worked at St. Francis for 29 years. She said her workload has nearly doubled in the past five years.

Moore, who is Catholic, said that initially she was torn between her desire to join a union and her faith. Early in the union campaign, she said, hospital chaplain Brother Richard Hirbe called her into a small meeting. “He gave us a long story about how bringing in the union was against the mission of the hospital,” she said. “That made it hard for me for a long time.” Hirbe could not be reached for comment.

Such tactics, combined with more standard anti-union strategies such as mandatory meetings in which supervisors pressure workers to resist organizers, have created a tense climate that makes a fair vote impossible, SEIU organizers said.

Despite intervention by high-level church leaders, including two bishops who met with the company’s management in May, the rhetoric grew increasingly acrimonious and polarized, spilling out into the poor, largely Latino and African American communities surrounding the hospitals.

About a dozen neighborhood priests have held prayer vigils asking for reconciliation. “We just want a simple dialogue with the management and the workers,” said Father David O’Connell, pastor of St. Francis Cabrini Church in the Athens neighborhood. “It’s become more like a large corporation than the small hospital we knew.”

Meanwhile, the SEIU and the company have traded public taunts, with the union saying in reports and Spanish-language radio ads that the large hospital chain has turned its back on the poor, and the chain taking out newspaper ads challenging SEIU to call for a union vote through the National Labor Relations Board.

In letters to company management, pro-union workers have said they will file for an election only after the consultant--the Malibu-based Burke Group--is dismissed and an atmosphere of calm and neutrality is restored.

Mahony Reportedly Seeking to Mediate

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who was criticized by labor for his role in defeating an effort to organize church gravediggers in 1991, has not spoken publicly on the conflict, but religious leaders say he has been working behind the scenes to mediate a resolution.

Some clergy supportive of the workers say there is a separation between the nuns and the management that runs the daily operations at the hospitals.

“The sisters don’t know what’s happening,” said one religious person who declined to be identified. “If they did, they wouldn’t allow it. I don’t understand why they don’t get more involved.”

Percy said there is a simple answer to that.

“We are aging,” she said with a heavy sigh. “There are simply fewer of us than there were before. But whereas there aren’t as many sisters, I believe our strength is still represented in governance.

“Yes, it’s true you may not see the sisters at all the hospitals. But our laity is no less committed to our mission than we are,” she said.