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Labor Board Decision Blocks Nurse Union

There has been much speculation and dread surrounding the recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions known collectively as “Kentucky River” ( UNA Action, Winter 2006, Summer 2006, Winter 2005). And now nurses in Utah, who voted to join United American Nurses (UAN), AFL-CIO, are bearing the full brunt of the ruling.

The Kentucky River decision redefined “supervisor” to include anyone who exercises the authority to assign and/or responsibility to direct the work of other employees on a regular and substantial basis. The board defined “substantial” to mean at least 10-15 percent of the employee’s time. For nurses, that means that working charge as little as one shift a week could be grounds for exclusion from a bargaining unit.

Over four years ago, nurses at Salt Lake City Medical Center voted to join UAN. The employer appealed the election and the ballots were impounded, pending a decision by the NLRB on Kentucky River; several months after the board’s ruling in October, its regional director applied that decision to the nurses at Salt Lake City Medical Center. He ruled that charge nurses assign RNs, using independent judgment to match the skills of the nurses and the acuity of the patients. The regional director then found that since the vast majority of the nurses employed at the time of the 2002 election acted in a charge capacity more than 10 percent of the time, they meet the definition of supervisor.

With the stroke of a pen, virtually all the RNs at the medical center were designated as supervisors. According to UAN, “The decision stands for the proposition that RNs cannot organize in acute care hospitals where charge duties rotate among virtually all the nurses. They are all supervisors of each other on alternate days … and therefore cannot ever achieve union representation.”

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