Dive Brief:

• About 500 nurses at the Mayo Clinic’s hospital in Mankato, Minnesota, will no longer be represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association after voting 213-181 to decertify their labor union, according to a release.
• A registered nurse at the hospital filed the petition to decertify the union with legal representation from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, according to a release from that group.
• The hospital said in an email statement that this was a staff-led effort “and we are grateful for the confidence our nursing staff has in Mayo Clinic Health System. We look forward to working with them directly.”

Dive Insight:

The effort to dissolve the union was driven by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a “highly powered, well-funded outside national organization bent on undermining worker power and collective bargaining rights,” the MNA said in the release.

That Right to Work group says its goal is to provide “free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses,” according to its website.

Earlier this year, that organization also led efforts for nurses at Tenet’s Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, to decertify their union following a nine-month long strike.

The Tenet nurses, however, voted to keep their union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, in a 302-133 vote in March.

Brittany Burgess, an RN at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato hospital, filed the petition to decertify the union there, according to a release from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund.

More than 200 nurses signed it, which is more than needed to initiate a decertification vote through the National Labor Relations Board, according to the release.

The right to work group also recently helped nurses at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine, in initiating a vote to decertify their union. That vote hasn’t happened yet.

That petition “comes as Foundation staff attorneys are increasingly assisting healthcare workers in obtaining votes to remove unwanted unions, including in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts,” the release said.

The results of the Mankato vote still need to be confirmed by the NLRB, which is expected in about a week, according to an email statement from the hospital.

“As outside anti-worker forces set their sights on other healthcare workers in our state, it is more important than ever that nurses stand together with other workers, patients, and our community to hold corporate power accountable to local interests,” Tammie Fromm, an operating room RN at Mayo Mankato, said in the MNA release.