Happy Labor Day!

I’m probably a bad manager.  Not because I don’t strive to make my nurses happy and not because I don’t honestly listen to them and try to either educate them on issues or improve their situations as I do both of those things.  But man, I’m a fan of unions. 

We’ve had quite the influx of new nurses lately, and only one was hired directly in as a state employee.  That’s par for the course for us as we generally prefer to hire on new nurses on a contractual basis.  We do that because 1) we can get them in and training/orienting faster and 2) it’s almost impossible to fire a state employee.  Between the union (UAW for RNs) and the Civil Service Commission rules, you can be a dangerously bad nurse and still keep your job.  So, until we’ve worked with you for a while and seen if you integrate with our team and can keep up with our unique pace, we’d prefer the option to part company with you quickly. 

And until this current batch of nurses, working this way was an obvious good.  We’d hire three nurses and end up only keeping one.  They just didn’t mesh, couldn’t keep up, or thought that this would be an ‘easy’ job.  But this current batch of 4.5 nurses have been phenomenal.  I mean truly great people and truly great nurses.  And slowly, we’ve been bringing them on as State employees so they get the full range of benefits (health, dental, retirement, paid time off, sick time, holiday pay…). 

Now, obviously when we bring on a new nurse, whether contractual or state, we have to train them.  Show them how to document their work, get them accustomed to our rules and regulations (we work for the state government, so there are a LOT of rules and regulations!), and integrate them into our team and flow of working hour to hour and day to day.  It’s generally between 2 and 6 months between being brought on as a contractual nurse and being brought on as a state nurse, so we don’t have to retrain them or anything.  They’re good to go at their job.  The differences are all in the background.  How to input their time, how to request time off, how the schedule will change, how oevertime works. 

While we don’t exactly have a process in place for these nurses, I do go to them and show them the basic differences.  One of the biggest reasons is that since I do all the scheduling, I’m more often than not tasked with filling in holes on the schedule.  I can almost always get a volunteer, but there’s plenty of times that I have to mandate somebody to work.  Contractual employees can’t be mandated.  State employees can. 

Welcome to the State!

One phrase comes up a lot during this conversation; Union negotiated.  It’s not that I’m pushing a union agenda, it’s that the individual unions negotiate with the state and their contract becomes the rules we have to work with.  When they get a break, how many hours they are required to work, when they have to report to their stations, how they get time off…. These are all union negotiated. 

Unfortunately, my state is a ‘Right to Work’ state.  It’s great marketing, but what it really means is that you have the ‘Right to Work’ without a union contract.  Normally when a group of employees decide to join up with a union they agree to work collectively.  Even if someone doesn’t want to be represented by the union, the whole group has decided it’s best and they will therefore be represented by the union.  IF the group decides they no longer want to be represented by the union, there are easy steps to take to end the union representation.  Normally it’s just a matter of calling a meeting, taking a vote… and that’s it.  But now, instead of new hires automatically being brought in and told what their union benefits are, they are asked if they’d like to join.  They are told the costs (you pay the union a certain amount of each check), and the benefits, and then if you don’t sign… you still get represented by the union contract. 

That’s right.  The state doesn’t have a two-tier system with one for union employees and one for non-represented employees.  Once the union negotiates the contract, it applies to everybody the union COULD represent, even if they aren’t paying members.  The only thing not belonging to a union costs you is their representation when there’s a problem with management.  Have a disciplinary hearing?  Well if you’re part of the union, you get a rep there that will remind the management team of every single union negotiated rule and regulation.  Basically, they’ll make sure the employee doesn’t get railroaded. 

That’s what I tell my new employees.  I tell them how I was being brought to a disciplinary hearing that would likely mean me taking several days without pay BUT my union rep got it taken down to a written reprimand on my HR record for 180 days.  A slap on the wrist.  And if I’d have okayed it, I probably could have gotten the matter completely thrown out, but as I honestly did do something wrong I figured accepting the slap on the wrist would be appropriate.  To me, that’s a really good reason to pay for a union, even if you get the same pay, the same days off, the same vacation when you don’t pay for representation. 

I know the world isn’t black and white.  There are plenty of shades of gray between ‘good intentions’ and ‘evil intentions’, and unless you only watch one side of the political debate things that happen are rarely ‘evil’.  But I swear, this just comes together so well for an ‘anti-union’ agenda that I can’t see it any other way. 

So, fade back to 2010 before my state had voted to be a ‘Right to Work’ state.  If you were hired on, the union automatically represented you, you got their full negotiating power, and they would make sure the management team wouldn’t railroad you.  Even if you didn’t like seeing that money leave your check every pay period, you probably enjoyed hearing about the days off or pay raises you got every year.  Pass Right to Work and you still get those things but now don’t have to pay them… but union membership didn’t drop precipitously.  So, again if you’re looking at this through nefarious lenses, how do you get people to abandon their unions? 

How about eliminating their negotiating power? 

You (the state) obviously can’t eliminate it entirely as that would be blatantly anti-union, but what if the Civil Service Commission with their newly ultra conservative member majority, made up a rule about eliminating negotiating for scheduling.  No union could make it part of the negotiating process to represent their members’ best interests when it comes to how you go about getting vacation time or how you work holidays or how you can  ask for incidental annual leave.  Every employee of the state would use the same rules. 

Nurses.  Correctional officers.  Police officers.  Park Rangers.  Accountants.  Computer Techs.  People from the departments of Civil Rights, Corrections, Education, Environmental Quality, Health and Human Services, Insurance & Financial Services, State, Natural Resources, Talent and Economic Development, Transportation, Treasury.  Because these vastly different groups of people in vastly different departments should all be treated the same, right? 

That’s what they did.  They wrote the rules so that every employee and every department allots vacation time in the same way.  And from those I’ve spoken with, absolutely NO employee is happy about it.  And almost all of them blame the unions for not negotiating better.  That’s right… the unions are getting blamed for not negotiating on scheduling when the Civil Service Commission has taken that right away from the Unions.  And since we’re now a ‘Right to Work’ state, employees are free to call up human resources and voice their displeasure with the union by leaving it and no longer paying for it. 

Now obviously the Civil Service Commission couldn’t just come out and say this was a union busting measure.  What they instead did was say this was for the ease of the state schedulers.  That having the same rules for everybody would streamline the system.  Well, as the person who schedules the nurses vacations and time off I can personally attest that this is NOT easier and that it in fact seems to arbitrarily screw over the nurses. 

Our old system, which was negotiated by the UAW worked like this:  Twice a year the nurses would, in order of seniority, write down all the vacation time they wanted.  So long as they had the annual leave available, they were granted it.  The first few nurses in order could basically get any days they wanted off.  The only rules as more and more people wanted the day off is that it couldn’t draw us below our natural level of critical staffing.  At our facility, critical staffing is 7 nurses for morning and afternoon shifts and one nurse for the midnight shift.  We have about 15 nurses on staff for morning and afternoon shifts and three nurses on for midnights.  So, in the contract there was room for each facility to set up it’s own limits under their guidelines.  We had it so that two nurses from any particular shift could take a vacation day.  Two morning nurses, two afternoon nurses, and two midnight nurses.  They had to be split between the two sides of the facility (we have ‘north side’ nurses and ‘south side’ nurses). 

Reasonably this system worked great.  You only had to plan your annual leave usage about 6 months in advance and except for some particularly popular times (Christmas, Spring Break, Thanksgiving, Easter…) there was plenty of room for any nurse to get the day off they wanted. 

The new system?  We do it a full year in advance and only one RN can have any day off.  You can’t take as many days as you want as you can only take one “prime week” or two “non prime weeks” on each of the first two passes.  On the last pass you can ask for any day off, but again it’s only one RN per day so most of the ‘good’ days are taken.  We have enough staff that if they all wanted to use the annual leave they earn in a year for vacations, they couldn’t take it all.  The union has negotiated for time off that you can’t use. 

When the union was negotiating this, it was complex.  That part of the union contract was about 6 pages in length with all the ‘in this circumstance’ and ‘in this sub-circumstance’ differences.  It left a lot of room so that facilities with 5 nurses on staff and critical staffing of one wouldn’t be treated with facilities with 45 nurses on staff and critical staffing of 7.  This new system is covered in one page.  Not even one page as it doesn’t take all of the page. 

I’ve heard that the unions are having a lot of defections.  People either not signing up or outright just exiting the union. 

The Civil Service Commission has done this for annual leave and overtime rules (the nurses hate that too).  I wonder how long it will take until there’s a strong enough majority of people that don’t want the union at all and can vote to throw the union out entirely.  After that, I wonder how long it will take until they realize that everything they liked was union backed and everything they didn’t like was fought against by the union. 

This is a very long way of saying Happy Labor Day!  If you enjoy the benefits you get while working, whether that’s the 40 hour work week, regulations pertaining to your personal safety, paid time off, sick time, health benefits, retirement, or many others, then thank a union.  I’m not naïve enough to think that unions are wholly good, but I firmly and honestly believe they’re overall good.