CNA Tactics

Workers' families, pets threatened

because they didn't want the union

Scott Barnes did not want to be represented by the California Nurses Association, which sought to impose itself on the nurses at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2002. To express his opinion, he posted these words on a website: "If the CNA is voted in, membership will NOT be voluntary, and YOU WILL have to give them $80 per month whether you like it or not. If the CNA really cared about any of us, they would let their reputation speak for itself, but they have no reputation and they have to force you to join." Subsequently, Barnes began to receive anonymous threatening calls saying that he should stop "f***ing with the union" and that his pet dogs might come to harm if he didn't.

Threatening calls were also made to Christine Foxon, another nurse with whom Barnes had co-founded an independent nurses' group. One caller said he knew she "had two young daughters" and she needed to "think about her family and her girls and back off." After one of these calls, Foxon dialed *69 and discovered that she had been called from an office of the CNA.

After reviewing the evidence, the National Labor Relations Board found that the union's menacing behavior had made a fair election impossible and overturned the narrow election win by the union.