Resurrection Health Care: Among Nation’s Worst Union Rights Violators

October 04, 2007

Resurrection Health Care, the Chicago-based hospital health care chain that has been fighting efforts of some of its 10,000 employees to form a union with AFSCME Council 31 for nearly five years, has been cited by an international watchdog group as one of the worst violators of union rights in the United States last year.

The Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), in its first Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, notes that the National Labor Relations Board last year issued a complaint against Resurrection, alleging that the second largest non-profit hospital system in the Chicago metropolitan area (with eight hospitals) had violated federal law by “interfering with, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” under the National Labor Relations Act.

Resurrection settled the charges by agreeing to inform employees that “management will not keep [employees] from distributing union literature on non-work times in non-work areas.

“Resurrection’s anti-union campaign has been so aggressive that it is now getting international notoriety,” explainsCouncil 31 Deputy Director Roberta Lynch (also an AFSCME International vice president). “We hope attention will prompt a change in the behavior of the system’s management.”

Read more about the Resurrection campaign at reformresurrection.org.