Votes Challenged; Union Election in Limbo at 2 Hospitals

Because of challenges to the legitimacy of some votes, a bid for unionization at the county’s two Catholic hospitals was too close to call Friday, and it could take months for a national labor board to sort out the results.

“It’s disappointing not to be able to hold the victory celebration employees were expecting,” said Lisa Hubbard, a spokeswoman for Service Employees International Union, which is seeking to unionize technical and service employees at the St. John’s hospitals. “We’re held in limbo.”

The nonprofessional, or service, bargaining unit, which includes such employees as certified nurse assistants and dietary staff, voted 249 to 239 to reject the union, but there were 58 challenged votes. In similarly close balloting in the technical bargaining unit, 92 employees voted in favor of the union and 89 were opposed, with six challenged votes. The technical bargaining unit includes workers such as radiology technicians.

A vote can be challenged for a number of reasons, including whether a voter has worked an appropriate number of hours or if he or she is in a supervisory position, said Tony Bisceglia, assistant to the regional director at the National Labor Relations Board, the organization called on to handle the count.

In addition, the board must investigate any complaints about unfair labor practices, Bisceglia said.

The hospitals’ nurses voted to unionize in January and are still negotiating a contract with administrators.

Both sides in the latest union vote said they were confident of an ultimate victory, with pro-union leaders pointing to the nurses’ union as a source of strong support and administrators calling a recent information campaign a success.

Thursday’s vote followed months of organizing and lobbying on both sides.

Some union proponents complained that administrators at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard and St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo overstepped their bounds with a campaign against the union.

“I’m more frustrated with the hospital’s anti-union campaign” than with the uncertainty about the outcome of the election, said Nancy Cross, a licensed vocational nurse at St. John’s Pleasant Valley. “I think the hospital went way overboard.”

Cross said she believed the hospital was misleading its employees about what kind of pro-union activities were allowed, including suggesting where and how people could distribute leaflets.

Hospital administrators said their campaign was educational and informational.

“I don’t believe [the union] is in the best interest of the employees,” said Charles Padilla, the administrator at St. John’s in Oxnard. “I like working directly with them and believe they have a voice.”

There is little argument about the rigors facing many of the hospital’s employees. They are often required to work extra hours, assume heavy patient loads and adjust to “floating,” or moving around the hospital in unfamiliar jobs.

Employees say they are being squeezed by the managed-care era of rising costs and lower insurance payments and that the union will help them negotiate better opportunities. Administrators say their backs are against the wall and the entrance of unions only complicates the issue.

“There’s just not enough money in the system,” Padilla said. “Unions would like for employees to believe they can solve all their problems. It certainly can’t solve the problem that there’s not enough money.”

Of the county’s eight general hospitals, two others are unionized: Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks and Ventura County Medical Center in Ventura.