Cathy Kahn

La Clinica Community Health Center, Pasco, Wash.  Office and Professional Employees

Cathy Kahn

"You know how much we've been through?" says Cathy Kahn. "It's taken so long, I have a big box of papers from all of it and I marked 'burn' in big letters on it. Someday, I think I'm going to have a bonfire. That's how hard it's been for us."

The ordeal Kahn is describing is the effort she and her colleagues at La Clinica Community Health Center in Pasco, Wash., had to go through just to organize into a union and win their first contract.

Kahn is a radiologic technologist and lab tech at the center, which, as she describes it, is "basically a community clinic. We see low-income patients who aren't able to pay." During summer 2004, she and other employees were in contact with an organizer from Local 8 of the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) because "we had a CEO who was real strong-armed," she recalls. "Things came to a boil after he fired three internists." They were eventually rehired after other employees, physicians and patients picketed the center—but, she says, "it made the employees aware that if they could do that to the doctors, they could do that to the rest of us."

Kahn and other employees started talking to their co-workers about organizing into OPEIU, holding meetings, distributing fliers and handing out cards, which workers could sign saying they wanted to be represented by the union.

Management fought back hard. "They used scare tactics," Kahn recalls. "They had staff meetings that were really captive audience meetings. They made people afraid by predicting that the bargaining process could result in layoffs. Even if it's illegal to threaten people, management still gets it in their minds and they don't forget. Management showed a lot of favoritism. If you followed the management ways—if you brown-nosed management and weren't behind the union— you got treated better. After a while, there were a lot of employees who were reluctant to support the union because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they stood up and spoke out."

Despite everything management had done, however, a majority of the employees voted in an National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in December 2004, to organize into OPEIU—but then, management went to the NLRB and filed objections to the election, trying to get it invalidated. Management claimed, for example, that the NLRB agent conducting the election left the polling area twice and took the ballot box and blank ballots with him. In fact, one of those times was a restroom break for about two minutes and the other time was to go to his car to retrieve a legal pad he needed. The NLRB heard management's objections and overruled them all because they had no impact on the vote, but it took months for that to happen.

Management was just as intransigent when the workers were trying to negotiate their first contract. Last year, the NLRB issued a complaint against management, accusing it of prohibiting employees from even discussing wages and hours among themselves, issuing a disciplinary warning to Kahn simply because she was involved in union activities protected by the law and much more. It was just in April of this year that the workers finally won their contract. It took nearly two-and-a-half grueling years after they had voted union in the first place, which is why Kahn is planning her bonfire.

Recently, when she heard that the Senate is considering the Employee Free Choice Act, which would both restore workers' freedom to choose a union and provide for arbitration when management and the union can't agree to a first contract, her response was "That's awesome! Where were they back three years ago when we needed them?"