A unit of nearly 1,100 medical technicians and service workers at Providence’s largest Oregon hospital voted 588-171 to unionize with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 49 in a unionization election held June 24-25.
The new unit at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center is the second largest group of hospital workers to unionize in Oregon in the past five years.
“We want to see the hospital come back to its roots, basically, where the sisters had left off,” said 11-year St. Vincent worker Stephanie Whitworth, referring to the Catholic nuns who founded Providence Health but have become less involved in the organization.
Workers’ biggest concerns are wages, staffing levels, healthcare benefits, and other benefits like bus passes.
“A big focus right now is to make sure that we don’t lose certain benefits that we’ve had,” said Whitworth, a switchboard operator and member of the union organizing committee.
The unit includes workers in 35 technical and support occupations, including nursing assistants, cooks, pharmacy technicians, laundry attendants, and anesthesia technicians.
Whitworth said she got involved with the unionization effort more than four years ago.
Whitworth said the nurses strike — and the public support for the nurses — sped up the unionization process for the new SEIU unit.
Roughly 5,000 nurses at eight Providence hospitals went on strike on Jan. 10, remaining on the picket line for more than six weeks before they reached a deal. At St. Vincent, 1,875 nurses and 70 nurse practitioners and doctors were on strike.
“It got a lot more people talking, and when we started to hear some of the statements that were made about the nurses from the general public as well as from administrators, it made a lot of us kind of realize where we needed to be,” Whitworth said.
With 523 beds, St. Vincent is the third largest hospital in Oregon.
SEIU Local 49 has represented similar workers at Providence Milwaukie Hospital since 2018, but that unit is less than one-fifth of the size of the St. Vincent unit. A unit of 838 hospital support workers at Providence Portland Medical Center voted by a one-vote margin to join Local 49 in 2018, but the National Labor Relations Board overturned that result because one of the ballots was smudged.
