Labor board certifies election results disbanding union at USC hospital
A director with the National Labor Relations Board has thrown out claims that USC Verdugo Hills Hospital’s management improperly influenced an election that led to the ousting of a healthcare workers’ union.
It was a decision based on a breach of procedure rather than on the claims’ merits.
Mori Rubin, a regional director with the labor board, determined that the leaders of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, known as SEIU-UHW, violated the board’s procedural rules when it failed to serve hospital management with its objections to the election by the time they were filed on Feb. 7.
“Although the union later attempted to cure this deficiency after it was made aware of the issue,” by serving hospital management on Feb. 11, “the union acknowledges that it failed to serve the employer with the objections when they initially were filed,” Rubin wrote in a decision last Wednesday.
In the same decision, Rubin certified the results of the election held on Jan. 30 and 31 that resulted in a 118-to-107 vote by hospital employees to disband the union they fought to form about three years ago.
The decision affirmed “… a majority of the valid ballots has not been cast for any labor organization and that no labor organization is the exclusive representative of the employees in the bargaining unit” that includes certified nursing assistants, monitor technicians, obstetric technicians, central processing employees, buyers and phlebotomists.
Union leaders have until Feb. 27 to request review of the decision by the labor board’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
Union representatives declined to comment. Hospital representatives also declined to comment.
“The board’s revised rules on representation case procedures exist for a reason: to ensure that elections are conducted quickly and certified quickly. It is for this reason that failure to comply with the rules’ rapid and clear time lines and procedures are fatal to a claimant,” wrote Glenn Taubman, an attorney with the anti-union nonprofit National Right to Work Foundation, in response to the union’s initial objections to the election.
Taubman is representing hospital employee Andrew Brown pro bono.
If no request for review is filed, it will signal the end of a months-long battle at the hospital between union and anti-union forces that was set into motion in October when Brown filed a petition calling for a vote on whether or not to keep the union in place.
The petition was rejected by the labor board because it arrived two days too late.
Brown filed another petition on Jan. 1, which resulted in the election in late January and was overseen by labor board officials.
Twitter: @lila_seidman
