Understanding Healthcare Orgainizing: The New Union Strategy

Ken Robbins had never seen a labor organizing effort like it: Instead of a traditional grass-roots drive to recruit members, a union in Illinois launched a series of very public attacks to discredit and embarrass a hospital. The goal: to pressure hospital executives to stay out of the way as the union signed up nurses and other employees.

The tactics bewildered Robbins, president of the Illinois Hospital Association. Wasn’t it self-defeating, he asked a union leader, to try to weaken an employer where you already represent a fair number of workers and hope to represent the rest?
“I’ve known the guy a long time, he’s a very solid guy,” Robbins says. “He just told me, ‘Ken, I know it doesn’t make sense—but it works.’ ”

The strategy—known as a corporate campaign—is now the linchpin of union organizing drives at hospitals around the nation. Unions use public events, political connections, the media and other avenues to bring into question a hospital’s quality of care, the level of charity care it provides and, in the case of a not-for-profit hospital, its tax-exempt status. Unions often recruit local consumer activists, neighborhood groups, and religious and environmental organizations to ramp up the pressure.
The campaigns might run for months or even years, interfering with a hospital’s ability to conduct routine business
And they can get very personal. In some cases, union representatives have shown up in front of hospital executives’ homes to picket....

What Are Corporate Campaigns?

A corporate campaign is a form of
reputational warfare waged through
broadsides, half-truths, innuendo, and a
staccato rhythm of castigation, litigation,
legislation, and regulation. It is fought in
the press and on television, on the internet,
in the halls of government, in the marketplace,
on the trading floor, and in the boardroom.

Though waged for a variety of reasons,
corporate campaigns, at their foundation,
attack the essential corporate character
of their targets and challenge the legitimacy
of the corporation as a social
form.

The corporate campaign is designed
to appeal to an underlying distrust of big
business. It is perhaps best understood as
a morality play in which the union or some
other antagonist defines standards of conduct
that reflect its own interests, challenges
the target company to meet these
standards, and then portrays the company
as a social outlaw when it proves unwilling

or unable to do so.