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LEGAL NEWSLINE

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Ohio nurses claim they were threatened before union vote

Mix

CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - Two Ohio hospital nurses want to overturn a union certification election because they allege they were intimidated by the union, and this tainted the election results.

The nurses filed an objection to the election and a motion to intervene Wednesday with Region 8 of the National Labor Relations Board. According to the motion, National Nurses Organizing Committee union organizers and Affinity Medical Center management entered into a "neutrality agreement" that gave union organizers preferential access to the facility helping them to impose monopoly bargaining on the nurses.

Company and union officials refused to disclose the terms of the secret agreement despite requests from the nurses, they claim.

They then allege that NNOC and Affinity jointly engaged in surveillance and trailed employees who were campaigning against the Union, reported their activities to management and threatened and attempted to cause management to retaliate against employees for engaging in protected activity. Also, the non-employee NNOC organizers who were operating within the workplace allegedly did so with Affinity's consent.

The two nurses assert that the arrangement between Affinity and NNOC union officials, combined with thei ntimidation of those who spoke out against unionization, may have affected the outcome of the union-organizing vote. They say that the NNOC union was granted monopoly bargaining powers over the workers by a single vote.

"Caught between union bosses and corporate executives, these nurses have been stripped of their rights to oppose forced unionism in their workplace," said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation which has furnished attorneys at no expense to the employees.

But the NLRB Region 8 did not see it this way. They denied the motion the following day. The employees through their attorneys have appealed to the NLRB in Washington D.C.

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