Allegheny County officials call on UPMC to end anti-union campaign and bargain with nurses

UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital nurses unionized citing safe staffing ratios and wanting more time with their patients.

Two of Allegheny County’s top officials are calling on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the commonwealth’s largest private employer, to quit their anti-union campaign and start negotiating with the newly unionized nurses at Magee-Womens Hospital in the Steel City. 

“ A thousand nurses stood up and they said, ‘we deserve respect and a voice’, and they deserve power to fight back for their patients,’” US Rep. Summer Lee (D-Allegheny) said at a press conference celebrating with the nurses on Tuesday.  

“We know that UPMC threw everything they had at you – lawyers, union busters, scare tactics, meetings that pulled you away from your patients – but here is what they could not break: Your solidarity, and your courage and your love for the people who you care for,”  Lee said.

Ahead of the vote to unionize, UPMC hired a consulting firm that, among other things, spread misinformation to divide the nurses. 

Those efforts failed, Lee said.

“This election is over. These nurses spoke, their ballots were counted, and it is what it is,” Lee said. 

“The campaign, the propaganda, the delay tactics. It’s time that it ends. It’s time that you stop stalling, that you stop wasting millions of dollars fighting the very people that keep your hospitals running.”

The Allegheny officials spoke to dozens of Magee nurses who gathered at a small park near the hospital on Tuesday to celebrate their historic union victory. 

Nearly 1,000 nurses are now part of Service Employees International Union Healthcare Pennsylvania (SEIU HCPA) after they voted last week 402-305 to join the union. It was the largest union election for Pennsylvania nurses in recent memory and it was the first time workers successfully unionized a UPMC hospital. 

There will be a second union election at the hospital in the coming weeks when 60 advanced nurse practitioners decide whether to join their colleagues with SEIU HCPA.

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato echoed Lee’s sentiments at the press conference and called on UPMC to bargain in good faith with the nurses. 

“ There is an incredible amount of gratitude that we all owe you for doing something so selfless, so inspiring and so brave to fight against a behemoth and an anti-union campaign to come together in solidarity and form this union,” Innamorato told the nurses. 

“ I just have one thing to say to UPMC. ‘Your nurses have spoken.’ It is time to respect their decision and get to the bargaining table as soon as possible.”

Magee-Womens Hospital is responsible for delivering 10,000 babies per year. hat’s roughly half of all babies born in Allegheny County each year, and the nurses at Magee want to spend more time with patients and have safer patient staffing ratios. 

Clare Duffus has been a postpartum nurse at Magee for the past four years, and she explained how her workload compares to what national guidelines suggest. 

“We work in couplets. That’s a mom and a baby. So that’s two patients,” Duffus told The Keystone. “National guidelines say that postpartum nurses should have one to three couplets. Three couplets being the max. So that’s six patients. Right now, we are working with four and five couplets every, every shift.”

Duffus added that caring for her patients is one of the motivating factors for joining the union.   

“ My patients are the most important priority to me, and I’m doing this for them,” she said.

“They deserve our time and energy, and right now we don’t have that time or energy to be giving them the best possible care that they deserve.”