The National Labor Relations Board blocked a vote that would let Long Island employees choose to leave the 1199SEIU health care union — and the National Right to Work Foundation claims it did so without cause, and through illicit backchannel communications.
Laura Gallo, a senior patient representative at Sun River Health Inc., submitted a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that would allow her and her coworkers to vote on whether they should remove themselves from the union. If they choose to do so, it will end the 1199SEIU’s control over nearly 230 Sun River Health workers across Long Island, including nutritionists, nurses, call center employees, and others.
Though the petition had reached the required number of signatures, and Gallo had followed the standard procedure for filing it, an NLRB regional director rejected the petition without explanation, deviating from the standard recommended rejection process that includes a hearing. By rejecting the petition for a vote, the NLRB essentially forced Sun River Health employees to remain in a union that they could have agreed doesn’t best represent their interests.
“These are the employees that the union claims to represent,” said National Right to Work Foundation President Marc Mix. “They’re just trying to get a vote to see whether or not this union still deserves their support.”
The fact that the NLRB dismissed Gallo’s petition without cause or explanation and without the typical hearing process means that they deferred to the union on this matter without allowing Gallo and her colleagues to counter the 1199SEIU’s argument with their own evidence. It also could possibly suggest that the dismissal happened because of illicit backchannel communications between the NLRB and the union.
“That’s a violation of employee rights,” Mix told the Press. “I don’t care who the employer is, no matter who it would be, anywhere in the country. If they did this to employees, if they stopped them from joining a union, there’d be litigation all over the place. But in this case, yeah, no big deal. We’ll just dismiss it because the employees are interested in possibly throwing the union out, as opposed to letting a union in.”
