Corporate Campaigns Could Deal Death Blows to Hospitals
After more than 30 years of union activity in health care organizations, changing labor union tactics now threaten the viability of Ohio’s hospitals, eating up vital time, resources and finances. A microcosm of the entire U.S. workforce, the hospital workforce is less than 15 percent unionized. This percentage has dropped over the past several decades, hitting unions financially in lost dues and also costing them bargaining power, economic clout and political influence. Responding to these declining numbers, organized labor embraced a new strategy for exerting pressure on employers: the corporate campaign.

Corporate Campaign vs. Traditional Organizing
Historically, labor unions built membership by targeting employers with poor working conditions and low employee morale, focusing recruitment efforts directly on the workers. When employees demonstrated sufficient interest in organizing, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) would conduct a secret ballot election and allow workers to vote for or against representation. These campaigns initially found great success, but over time grew expensive, time-consuming and risky. By the 1980s, unions were losing nearly half of their certification elections.¹

The corporate campaign represents a completely different strategy. Instead of targeting workers, the labor union aggressively attacks the reputation of a target employer, undermining public confidence and key stakeholder relationships until management decides it must yield to the union’s demands or risk the company’s financial well-being. Corporate campaign tactics allow a union to wage economic, political and psychological warfare against a company—or a hospital. One union leader described a corporate campaign as “death of a thousand cuts rather than a single blow.”²  Ultimately, the goal of the corporate campaign is to pressure an employer into agreeing to a “neutrality agreement,” requiring them to remain silent or neutral while the union organizes employees. The union also seeks a “card check” election, where the employer forgoes the formal, secret election process overseen by NLRB.

Targeting Health Care
Hospitals and other health care organizations are especially vulnerable to corporate campaigns, with fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s health care workers currently organized.³ This translates into six to seven million non-union health care workers whose anticipated dues would represent approximately $3 billion.⁴  In addition, unlike with most manufacturing jobs, there is little risk that the work of most health care employees will be transferred overseas.

Costs of Corporate Campaigns
The campaigns redirect precious health care resources by forcing health care providers to defend themselves against union attacks instead of focusing on serving patients and improving their communities’ health.  To survive financially and offer outstanding care to all patients, hospitals rely heavily on the trust and support of their communities—factors put at risk by corporate campaign efforts.

Corporate campaigns jeopardize not only hospitals’ reputations and rights as employers, but also their time, resources and financial well-being. One analyst from PricewaterhouseCoopers explained, “typically, the threat of a union pulls two to three full-time equivalents out of senior management . . .unless it is a large, resource-rich organization, it is impossible for them to do business as usual.”⁵ Unlike union efforts focused on benefiting employees, a corporate campaign is driven by the desire to increase membership at any cost—even the cost of putting a community’s health care at risk.

¹Manheim, Jarol B., “The Death of a Thousand Cuts,” 2001. p. 37.
²Manheim, Jarol B., “The Death of a Thousand Cuts,” 2001. p. v.
³Matchulat, John Jay, “Healthcare:  Still Easy Pickin’s For Organized Labor’s Most Aggressive Unions,” Labor & Employment, Winter 2005.
⁴Manheim, Jarol B., “Labor Pains:  Corporate Campaigns in the Healthcare Industry,” June 2003, p. 7.
⁵Rogers, Michelle, “Under Siege,” HealthLeaders Magazine,  Jan. 1, 2004.