Organizers say a majority of nurses at four hospitals in the Des Moines metro have signed cards indicating they want to join the Teamsters Union.
Colin Russell, a nurse who works in the ICU at Iowa Methodist in downtown Des Moines, was among several speakers at a rally near the hospital yesterday. He said too many nurses are leaving because managers aren’t listening to their concerns about staffing levels, pay and patient care. “We have a high turnover rate,” Russell said. “We’d love to knock that down, but when we’re shut out of these conversations, when they change policies without even asking us or even over our objections, it makes it really hard to keep someone energetic and happy about working in a hospital when your voice doesn’t matter.”
Russell and others at the event accused hospital management of trying to discourage nurses from forming a union. “They’ve been pulling in nurses for one-on-one meetings…They’ll say, well, it’s with a supervisor or whatever, but then there will be this other person,” Russell says. “It’s a third party consulting group. They pay them large sums of money and they bring them in…and they try to spin it as saying, ‘We just want you to have all the facts.’”
United Nurses of Iowa sent a letter to UnityPoint yesterday, asking managers to voluntarily recognize the union and begin contract talks. UnityPoint responded, saying “we deeply value each nurse” and “believes representation by an outside party is not in the best interest of our hospitals, nurses or patients.” Hospital managers indicated they would only bargain with Teamsters representatives if UnityPoint nurses at the four central Iowa hospitals vote in a secret ballot election to form a union. About 1500 nurses work at Iowa Methodist, Iowa Lutheran, Blank Children’s Hospital and Methodist West Hospitals.
The Service Employees International Union represents nurses at Finley Hospital in Dubuque and University of Iowa Health Care. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union represents nurses at MercyOne in Sioux City.
