Labor turns out to support RESPECT Act

Dozens of nurses and labor activists packed a House Education and Labor subcommittee hearing in May to listen to testimony on the question of whether the 2006 rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that broaden the definition of “supervisor” have resulted in the misclassification of workers.

Former NLRB member Sarah Fox testified that the broad interpretation of “two of the terms in the statutory definition of supervisor—assignment and responsible direction—threatens to create a new class of workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.”

The panel of witnesses also testified about the Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradeworkers (RESPECT) Act, a bill to amend the definition of supervisor in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

“The freedom to organize and collectively bargain has been under severe assault in recent decades, thanks to a weak federal labor law in dire need of reform,” said Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee. “The RESPECT Act will restore that freedom by addressing a series of decisions that undermine the original intent of the NLRA and that fly in the face of common sense.”

William Tambussi, labor counsel and negotiator at Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey, testified that the unionized nurses at Cooper, who are represented by Health Professionals and Allied Employees, an AFT Healthcare affiliate, must meet three criteria before being declared supervisors—involvement in setting compensation, hiring and firing, and scheduling staff assignments on a weekly and monthly basis.

“If the RESPECT Act were enacted, it would not change anything for Cooper, because we already do not treat our charge nurses who assign and responsibly direct other nurses, technicians and licensed practical nurses, with respect to patient care, as supervisors,” said Tambussi. “The clarity achieved by the RESPECT Act reflects both the original intent of the NLRA’s framers, and everyone’s common sense and practical notions of who a supervisor is in the workplace.”

Panelist Lori Gay, a registered nurse at the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, was not as fortunate as her counterparts at Cooper. Gay voted to join the United American Nurses in 2002, but her vote and the votes of dozens of her colleagues have never been counted because the hospital claimed two-thirds of the nurses were supervisors and ineligible to join a union.

“For five years, our ballots have remained impounded while we have waited for clarification on what it means to be a supervisor,” said Gay. “When the Oakwood [also sometimes known as Kentucky River] decisions were released last year, the Washington, D.C., NLRB remanded our case back to the regional director. According to the regional director’s decision, 64 out of 153 nurses at the medical center in 2002 were supervisors, including myself.”

Gay called the regional director’s decision “absurd.” “As a charge nurse, I am in charge of the pencil. Typically, I spend 10 minutes at the end of my shift filling out an assignment sheet for the oncoming shift, making sure that every patient has a bed and a nurse. I record the traffic in and out of the unit—it’s as simple as that,” said Gay. “I don’t see myself as a supervisor, and neither do my colleagues. At our hospital, there’s a managerial track and there’s a clinical track—and as nurses, we are squarely within the clinical track. We take care of patients. That’s what we do.”