Nursing Home Workers Choose IBEW Local 15

Nursing Home Workers Win
IBEW Representation
More than 100 workers at Lemont Rehabilitation Center in Illinois will have a
voice on the job with Local 15, Downers Grove, following a long campaign that
ended with a decisive vote in late April.
The 56-21 vote gives the nursing assistants, dietary, housekeeping and
clerical workers union representation for the first time. Organizer Charlotte White said exorbitantly high health insurance premiums, unfair treatment and
arbitrary leave policies were among the reasons the workers reached out to the IBEW.
An unsuccessful election in June 2003 was overturned by the NLRB, which found the management guilty of firing, spying on, intimidating and threatening
members of the internal organizing committee with physical harm, White said.
"You can just imagine what these people were up against," said White,
praising the 16 active members of the internal organizing committee. "This was one of the most vicious anti-union campaigns I’ve seen."
Union supporters also had to fight the widespread perception that the owner
of the facility, Eric Rothner, was a good-hearted, philanthropic member of the
Chicago Jewish community. He was named one of Chicago’s top 100 Jews of the 20th century by Chicago Jewish News.
On the job, the workers suffered from poor working conditions, with
supervisors falsifying records to compromise pro-union workers. Commonplace practice included playing favorites in the allocation of overtime and personal time. And family health insurance cost $600 a month, White said.
Despite the problems during the campaign, White said she is hopeful they will
be successful in getting a first contract negotiated. She has enlisted the
help of an interfaith group that has agreed to talk to Rothner.
Rothner owns or is a major investor in more than 65 nursing homes in Illinois
and Wisconsin, and workers at the other facilities have been watching the
campaign unfold at Lemont with interest, White said. "People from other nursing homes are calling me now and wanting a union," she said.
Local 15 Business Manager Bob Joyce said it makes sense to seek to organize
nursing home workers, particularly since there is renewed emphasis on growing
membership numbers.
"We will organize anybody anywhere anytime that wants to be in a union,"
Joyce said.

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