A solid majority of nurses and technical staff at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin voted to form a new union on Friday after organizing for more than a year.
More than 310 registered nurses will form Central Vermont Healthcare United, a local union within American Federation of Teachers – Vermont. AFT-Vermont is the same labor organization that represents nurses working at the two other Vermont hospitals within the University of Vermont Health Center, which are University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington and Porter Medical Center in Middlebury.
Currently, each local union bargains separately with the administration at their respective hospital rather than at the network level.
Kate Roche, a nurse educator, got involved in the effort to unionize after realizing she was having similar conversations with many other CVMC nurses who were facing challenges around staffing levels, compensation and how decisions in their departments were being made.
“I saw all these people try on their own unsuccessfully to impact major change,” Roche said. “I figured, we have to try something else.”
The new local union at Central Vermont Medical Center will also include a separate bargaining unit representing 130 licensed professional nurses and technical staff. A parallel unit is active in the local union at UVM Medical Center.
Michael Mulcahy, an emergency department technician involved in the union organizing effort, has worked at Central Vermont Medical Center since 2015. During that time he also worked as a paramedic for UVM Medical Center where the position was unionized.
“I was able to experience sort of similar jobs from the two different perspectives,” Mulcahy said. In the unionized position, “you have a voice in a lot of aspects of your job, and in the other you obviously have much less of a voice,” he said.
Mulcahy said he believes unionization will lead to better recruitment and retention of staff at the hospital because of the transparent expectations the bargaining will set around wages. As a Montpelier resident whose family gets care at CVMC, he said he also believes a unionized workplace will provide better health care for the community.
Anna Noonan, president and chief operating officer at CVMC, said in a statement that the administration respects the decision to unionize.
“Our guiding principle throughout this process has been to foster a collaborative approach, focused on educating our team about what unionization might mean for each of us, and encouraging everyone to make sure their voice was heard. We recognize and respect the decision of our nurses and our technical employees to join a union.”
Having the two groups of workers organizing at the same time allowed them to support each other, both Roche and Mulcahy said. They have also been able to benefit from the union’s experience at the other network hospitals.
Some CVMC support staff who helped to organize the union drives want to emulate the support staff at UVMMC, who voted to unionize in January and are now bargaining their first contract, Mulcahy said.
“I think we will just carry that torch forward to organizing the support staff,” he said.
Correction: A previous version of this story was incorrect about the name of the Vermont labor organization that Central Vermont Medical Center staff will be joining, and about the number of UVM Health Network hospitals with staff in the same union.
