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As hundreds of striking nurses picket Unity Hospital, another group of 345 employees – who provide a range of patient care from nursing to food services and transportation – is poised to reject a contract offer from the facility.
Members of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota who work at Unity are scheduled to vote Wednesday, June 29, on their first union contract with Allina Health. The bargaining team is recommending rejection.
While a no vote won’t necessarily signal an immediate strike, it will show the level of displeasure among employees with Allina management.
The walkout by members of the Minnesota Nurses Association is focused on the company’s demand that nurses adopt a more expensive and inferior health insurance plan and on concerns about patient care and workplace violence.
For SEIU Healthcare Minnesota members, many of their concerns can be summed up in one word: fairness. Last month, Allina Health announced it was merging Unity Hospital in Fridley and Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids under one license and eliminating duplicate services.
“It’s one hospital with two buildings,” David Kanihan, an Allina spokesman, told the StarTribune newspaper. “They’re separate by 10 miles, but they’re serving essentially the same market. The vision is to have very little duplication of services.”
In 2017, Unity is scheduled to take the name, “Mercy Hospital — Unity Campus,” the newspaper reported.
But in bargaining, Allina has offered Unity workers far less than the wages, health insurance and other benefits enjoyed by Mercy employees under a contract reached last year.
“We want a fair contract,” said Julie Scharber, a member of the union negotiating committee and a unit coordinator at the hospital. “We are worth just as much as Mercy workers, who pay half as much as we do for insurance.”
SEIU members at Unity joined the union a year ago and are bargaining their first contract with Allina. On Wednesday, they held a rally on the nurses’ picketline. Many have been marching regularly with the strikers since the walkout began Sunday.
The SEIU group includes nursing assistants, unit coordinators, pharmacy technicians, environmental aides, dietary aides, cooks, emergency department technicians, telemetry technicians, radiology assistants and transportation workers. Altogether, they play a key role in every level of patient care.
Like the nurses, these workers face high patient caseloads that endanger both patients and workers.
“We are being asked to do too many things in too little time,” said Corbin Mattila, who has transported patients around the hospital for eight years.
“I’ve had back injuries multiple times from moving patients or even preventing a patient from falling,” said Barb Shoemaker, a patient care technician for more than four years. “We need safe patient care and safety for our nurses and ourselves.”
Scharber said nursing assistants sometimes face caseloads as high as 24 patients – numbers that exceed Allina’s own standards and are not safe.
Walking the picketline with the nurses has been an educational experience for the SEIU members, many of whom got their first taste of unionism in last year’s organizing drive.
Jared Findell, a nursing assistant in the hospital’s intensive care unit, carried a sign that read, “Allina Health” with the word “Health” crossed out and replaced with “Wealth.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said. “It’s wonderful, it’s invigorating, to all be out here showing support and standing up for what we represent.”