Vote axed on bid to unionize HUP

The union that sought to organize 1,900 employees of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania withdrew its request to unionize the workers last week, just one day before a scheduled referendum vote on the matter. Officials with the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Workers District 1199C said yesterday that the move is only temporary and that they will continue to fight against what they consider the HUP administration's anti-union stance. The union election, which was to include HUP's "non-professional" workers -- including lab technicians, nurse's assistants and secretaries -- was originally scheduled for Thursday but the union withdrew their petition from the National Labor Relations Board for a union election the day before amid indications that the motion would fail. "We think the union recognized that it didn't have the kind of support it thought it had [and so it withdrew]," said Tom Beeman, the University Health System's senior vice president for hospital operations. But union president Henry Nicholas said, "we didn't withdraw from the election, we just temporarily withdrew the petition -- the campaign continues." Nicholas repeated claims made earlier this month in a full-page advertisement in The Philadelphia Daily News that HUP was engaged in a misinformation campaign and was trying to force its employees to vote against unionization. "They had crushed the aspirations of the workers to freely choose," he said, adding that the next step in the campaign is an attempt to boycott the hospital. But HUP officials countered that their employees -- unlike their counterparts at other local hospitals, who have unionized -- got along fine with administrators and didn't need a union to represent them. Beeman said officials are "very happy with the outcome" for now, but understand that the union will keep campaigning. "They have every right to continue to campaign," Beeman said. "But we still hope they won't have support." Beeman said that Nicholas' charge that HUP did not allow the workers to freely choose is "entirely preposterous," adding that the union "underestimated how intelligent [the] staff is." In the weeks preceding the election, union officials conducted a heavy unionizing campaign at the hospital and local media. The Daily News ad, though, drew several angry responses from HUP employees who said that it was the union that was misrepresenting the facts, not the hospital. HUP officials held employee meetings and distributed memos that explained the process and the employees' options. Beeman said he will continue to have dialogues with the staff and "work on issues" even though a vote is no longer imminent.