Connecticut nursing home workers who struck against severe takeaways last July are returning to work with a rare victory: a Labor Board injunction has forced their employer to restore their old jobs and contract terms.
“This is a fairly extraordinary event, given how tilted labor law is in this country and how little enforcement power it has,” said SEIU 1199 New England’s Deborah Chernoff. “It’s a testament to the egregious nature of what HealthBridge did.”
Some 600 HealthBridge workers in Connecticut will return to work March 3, ending an eight-month strike and lockout against the ferociously anti-union chain of nursing homes.
Draconian Cuts
From the start of bargaining two years ago, company negotiators were blunt about their goal: to drive standards in HealthBridge’s five unionized Connecticut nursing homes down to the level of its three non-union homes.That meant eliminating staff-to-patient ratios, reducing wages to $9 an hour (a $5 cut), slashing sick days in half, forcing workers to pay most of their own health care costs, replacing their pension with a 401(k), and cutting the work week to 37.5 hours by eliminating paid lunches. The company proposed big takeaways from every clause in the contract—except “management rights.”
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