800 Nurses At St. Mary Medical Center Will Join Union

In what organizers are noting was a “landslide victory,” the nurses at St. Mary Medical Center will join a union.

The vote, which took place last Thursday and Friday, was 403 to 285. The results showed that the majority cast their ballots to unionize.

The nurses will join Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP).

“As nurses we have always been true frontline advocates for our patients. As healthcare has deteriorated to health business, nurses have had to bear the weight of the cuts in staffing and resources” said nurses Joe Gentile. “Now more than ever we need to unify and advocate for each other. I’ve worked at St. Mary for over 35 years. This is my hospital, my home and my community. This hard fought victory has given us a voice, a hope, and a future.”

Lynn McCarthy, another nurse, said her colleagues who voted to join the union were “fighting for ourselves and patients.”

The effort to unionize at the 371-bed hospital medical center that earned a $55 million profit in 2018 has been ongoing for years but increased as there were changes to operations in the past two years. A previous effort to form a union fell apart in 2016.

St. Mary Medical Center has been owned by Trinity Health since it merged with former hospital owner Catholic Health East in 2013. It reformed under the five-hospital Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic system last year.

Nurses have made their unionization efforts known in recent months and also raised concerns about staffing levels, which the hospital said offers excellent patient care.

St. Mary Medical Center issued the following statement on Monday following the union vote:

Last month, Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic asked the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election in the nursing unit at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, PA. The election gave nurses the right to choose whether to work directly with nursing leadership as they have in the past, or to have PASNAP act as their exclusive agent on issues of pay and benefits. Nurses were split on the issue, with strong feelings on both sides, but by a 58 to 42 percent margin, voters chose to change the historical relationship and let PASNAP be their negotiator.

There are still legal issues to resolve that could alter that outcome, and the parties have a week to consider their options. If the result of the vote becomes legally binding, the relationship between the union and the hospital follows a legally prescribed path of bargaining to see if they can agree on a contract, and we expect that process to begin sometime this fall. Nurses who do not wish to be represented by PASNAP must wait at least a year before exercising their right to ask for another election to reconsider their choice, which could happen if the parties fail to reach an agreement for more than a year.

Nurses told a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently that Trinity Health made “significant interference” into unionization efforts. Sources relayed to LevittownNow.com that company hired Florida-based Yessin and Associates in an attempt to halt unionization efforts.

The unionization drive was one of the largest in the state in recent years.