Laura Garren, RN

Mercy Medical Center Roseburg, Ore. Oregon Nurses Association (ONA)/United American Nurses (UAN)

Laura Garren

Laura Garren has been delivering and taking care of babies at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, Ore., for 20 years. 

In her time at Mercy she has seen administrations come and go. About two years ago she began to get worried about increasingly inadequate staffing levels having an adverse effect on patient care. Garren says they were short 40 nurses and the situation was getting worse.

Eager to turn things around at Mercy, Garren and her co-workers began forming a union with the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA)/United American Nurses (UAN) to gain a voice in the decisions affecting their work and to ensure quality patient care. “We had a list of 50 reasons why nurses would join a union, and not one of them was finances. We wanted a voice in the hospital in how they practice medicine—because as nurses we really didn’t have one,” says Garren.

But the hospital was not interested in letting the nurses make a free choice. Management fought back with a campaign of fear and misinformation.

Making the staffing ratio even worse, nurses were pulled off the floor and forced to attend anti-union meetings during work time. Garren remembers hearing a colleague say, “While I’m here at this mandatory meeting, the nurse upstairs who is covering my patients, now has 10 patients.”

The nurses also were shown anti-union videos that said unions were violent and would slash their tires. Garren says she looked around the room and could not believe that any of her fellow nurses would slash her tires. The nurses got anti-union mailings three times a week. The CEO came into meetings to tell the workers why they should not join the union. “Management’s anti-union campaign has been a real eye-opener and it’s been scary. If you asked the nurses at Mercy they would have said, ‘it’s terrifying and I’m afraid to lose my job,’” says Garren.

Despite the hospital’s anti-union campaign, Garren and her co-workers have stayed together and won their union. However, one year after having their union certified, the workers still have no contract.

Management has come to bargaining meetings unprepared to negotiate, stalling the negotiations. The nurses were forced to call in a federal mediator and still wait for management to respect their choice for union representation.