sinai in the news
Mount Sinai nurses vote against joining national union
By Mike Colias
Aug. 07, 2007
(Crain’s) — Nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital have rejected a national union’s bid to organize at the West Side institution.
The nurses voted against the union, the National Nurses Organizing Committee, by 293 to 152 in June, according to a hospital statement released late Monday.
Officials with the union, an arm of the California Nurses Assn., did not immediately respond to phone messages left Tuesday.
The rejection is a setback for the union, which targeted Mount Sinai’s 508 registered nurses in its first petition in Illinois in two years. In 2005, it wrested away representation of 1,800 Cook County Bureau of Health Services nurses from the Illinois Nurses Assn. That was the national union’s first push for members outside California.
“This is a huge loss for the union,” said K. Bruce Stickler, a Mount Sinai board member and a labor relations attorney at Drinker Biddle Gardner Carton in Chicago, which advised the hospital.
The union is trying to boost membership in the Chicago area, where the vast majority of nurses are not unionized.
“We are in hopes that the union will accept the results without costly objections or challenges,” a Mount Sinai statement says.
