Nursing home worker fired after joining union campaign

By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor

Elizabeth Lehr was well liked by her managers at Laurelhurst Village senior care community. Six months after her summer 2007 hire as a receptionist, Lehr got an “employee of the month” plaque. She was recognized for her “kind manner” and praised for answering the phone “with a smile in her voice.” Lehr, 23, says she loved her job, her co-workers, and the residents she came to know, some of whom would spend all day with her in the lobby of the Southeast Portland assisted living facility.

On April 2, she was fired — 10 days after she got involved in a union campaign.

That’s all too common in the United States, where every year thousands of workers are fired, illegally, for trying to get union representation in the workplace.

Lehr first learned there was a union campaign when she overheard two office managers discussing it. Workers were coming in when they weren’t scheduled, the managers said, and talking to co-workers in the break room. Later, a manager giving Lehr a ride home remarked casually that dietary aide Henry Olivera was involved with the union campaign, and said he’d better watch out.

Lehr decided to ask Olivera about the union.

Service Employees International Union Local 503 — a 45,000-member statewide union of janitors, health care workers, and public employees — represents workers at 26 Oregon nursing homes. Its staff organizers had begun meeting with workers at Laurelhurst Village. Laurelhurst Village, 3060 SE Stark, Portland, used to be Catholic-owned Mt. St. Joseph, but was sold in 2004 to a for-profit company, Portland-based Farmington Centers. Farmington owns 16 nursing homes in three states, including Farmington Square in Beaverton, Gresham, and Tualatin, and other locations.

Olivera, one of the earliest Laurelhurst Village workers to get involved in the union campaign, helped arrange a visit at her house from a union organizer to explain the union campaign. Lehr says unionizing sounded reasonable to her.

“I felt it was the best avenue for us to have a living wage and benefits that we deserve, and have a voice to advocate for residents,” Lehr told the Northwest Labor Press.

Lehr agreed to join the organizing committee, and started talking to co-workers. A week later, her first public act in support of the union tipped off management to her sympathies. Lehr and four other workers made an unannounced visit to Laurelhurst Village CEO Hannah Austin to protest the unexplained suspension of a pro-union co-worker.

Two days after that, April 1, Lehr came in on a day off to distribute fliers in the break room during shift change, taking care to hand them only to workers who were off the clock. In walked the site administrator, the second-in-command manager at Laurelhurst Village. Managers have their own break area, Lehr says, and until the union campaign were seldom seen in the break room used by workers. The administrator, maybe to justify her presence there, made a big show of looking for coffee, Lehr said, not knowing that the coffee maker there had been broken for a long time. Lehr figured the administrator was there to conduct surveillance. But Lehr wasn’t intimidated. She continued distributing fliers to workers until another manager told her to leave. Lehr argued that she had a right to be there, since the company had allowed off-shift workers on the premises in the past.

In any case, shift change was over. Lehr left the break room, and sat on a couch in the lobby of the skilled nursing building, waiting for a friend to get off work. But again the manager appeared, and ordered her to leave.

“What will happen to me if I stay?” Lehr remembers asking. Lehr found out: The police would be called. A pair of officers arrived (one of them a police union rep, Lehr says). Lehr left rather than be arrested for trespass.

When Lehr returned to work, she was called into a meeting with her supervisor, a human resources manager, and the CEO. She was called insubordinate for having lingered in the lobby; told she’d been “physically aggressive” during the employee delegation to the CEO; and accused of copying paychecks to get names of employees the union could talk to. She denied the accusations, but was fired anyway, escorted off the property, and banned from the facility.

For Lehr, it was a heavy blow. Laurelhurst Village contested her unemployment claim. She’s jobless in a tough job market, and worries that being fired for unionizing will be a stain on her employment record, something hard to explain on future job applications. But more than that, she loved her job, her co-workers and the nursing home residents.

“There’s this misperception that people who want to unionize are disgruntled workers,” Lehr said. “I was organizing because I love my job. I would never have done it if I didn’t love this place.”

The union campaign slowed dramatically after Lehr was fired, organizers say. A drop-in union meeting, which had 27 workers the week before Lehr’s firing, had three attendees the week after. Before the firing, 21 workers were serving on the union organizing committee, each agreeing to communicate with five to 10 co-workers and act as the eyes and ears of the union drive. Two-thirds of them dropped away after the firing, and stopped returning what had been almost daily calls from staff organizers.

At work, managers patrolled the halls. Known union supporters were watched, and called in to meetings with managers.

The shift in atmosphere was really noticeable, said certified nursing assistant Andrea Glaser, an organizing committee member. Glaser said most workers she approached said yes to signing union authorization cards, before Lehr’s termination. Now most were declining to sign, and half of those told her it was because they didn’t want to lose their jobs. Local 503 organizer Guillermo Galarreta said 77 Laurelhurst Village workers have signed union cards, out of about 150 workers; so the union is right on the edge of majority support.

Union campaigners decided it was time to shift the campaign’s focus from getting new signatures to getting Lehr’s job back. Supporters handed out a sort of open letter to management with names and pictures of pro-union workers calling for Lehr’s reinstatement.

The union worked with Lehr and others to file a series of “unfair labor practice” charges with the National Labor Relations Board. The union is seeking a court injunction ordering Laurelhurst Village to reinstate Lehr and cease and desist from other violations of federal labor law.

The union turned for support to allies like State Sen. Rosenbaum and State Rep. Jules Bailey, whose legislative districts include Laurelhurst Village. The two wrote letters to Laurelhurst Village calling on the company to respect its workers’ right to unionize. The company gets most of its revenue from taxpayers, via Medicaid and Medicare.

The union is also appealing to the community for support, calling on trade unionists and members of the public to contact company CEO Hannah Austin at 503-535-4861 or by e-mail at [email protected] and demand Lehr’s reinstatement.

SEIU is organizing a community forum to take place Tuesday, May 19, at 5:30 p.m. Columbia Heights Presbyterian Church, 2828 SE Stephens St.

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