UNAC Member Featured at National Human Rights Awards Celebration

May 17, 2007

DINNER CHAT. Actor Bradley Whitford, of NBC’s “The West Wing” and host of the awards celebration, shares a laugh with UNAC member Asela Espiritu, RN, during dinner.

Photo Credit:

Voice@Work, AFL-CIO

What we have at Kaiser should be implemented as the law,” said Asela Espiritu, RN, a member of United Nurses Associations of California/UHCP/AFSCME, who was a featured speaker at this year’s annual Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Awards Celebration. Espiritu played an active role in the successful majority sign-up campaign – a process that enables workers to form a union when a majority say they want one – at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center-Orange County in Anaheim, Calif.

Kaiser is one of the nation’s largest health care providers and employs 10,000 AFSCME members.

In her remarks before the 400 guests gathered in Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, Espiritu praised Kaiser Permanente for agreeing to the majority sign up process. “That was the key and I became very involved,” she said. “Within three months of the cards being signed, we were on to negotiations. Right away there were changes with salaries and how things got done. I was included in a lot of decisions on how to make work easier and provide high-quality patient care.”

Kaiser Permanente was honored at the April 18 event sponsored by the AFL-CIO’s American Rights at Work for creating “a model partnership with its workers’ unions based on shared commitment to improve patient care,” In the last 10 years, the non-profit organization and the coalition of unions representing 90,000 health care workers and support staff, have crafted a collaborative relationship that has made Kaiser Permanente a better workplace and provider of high-quality care.