“We weren’t just fighting EMMC. We were fighting every hospital in the state of Maine.” — A History of Nurse Organizing in Maine
PHOTO: EMMC registered nurses announce their effort to form a union on July 11, 1975.
One day Dottie Barron, a registered nurse at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, was called into her supervisor’s office. Her first thought was, “Oooh! Somebody is doing something!” What she heard next filled her with excitement. The supervisor wanted to know if Barron knew anything about an effort among some of her colleagues to form a union.
“The funny thing is, long before I ever heard anybody say anything, I used to say, ‘Jeez, what we need around here is a union,’” recalled Barron. “When I was called into management’s office about the union, I guess she pegged me as interested, but I hadn’t gotten the word yet because they were trying to be very low-key. I just listened to her and said, ‘Oh?’ I really hadn’t heard anything at that point. So I left that meeting and thought, ‘hmm…I wonder who is safe to talk to and I started asking people questions. Then I found the right person and away I went.”
The next thing Barron knew she and her union sisters were holding a press conference at the Labor Temple (now called the Solidarity Center) in Brewer to announce the formation of their union.
“For too long the registered professional nurses at the Eastern Maine Medical Center have been frustrated with their ability to function at the level for which they have been prepared,” said Patricia Martin, the chairwoman of the organizing committee. “Therefore, these registered professional nurses feel that now is the time to take a positive and progressive step forward by joining together to form a collective bargaining unit; a first for the State of Maine. The primary purpose: quality patient care.”
It was July 11, 1975 and the scrappy group of nurses would go on to win the first union election at a hospital in the State of Maine.
For the nurses, wages weren’t the driving issue, although they were indeed fed up with being paid less than men. They wanted more involvement in defining patient care programs and better in-service education, personnel polices and practices around staffing assignments and communication between management, physicians and nurses. Most of all, they wanted a collective voice to improve patient care. The nurses claimed 45 percent of the 200 eligible RNs at the facility had pledged their support for the union
Barron grew up in Millinocket, which was then a union stronghold. Her father was a union man and worked at Great Northern Paper, so she knew first-hand the benefits of union membership. She was about five years old when she began thinking about becoming a nurse when she grew up. She remembers asking her mother what the workmen down the street were building. Barron's mother told her it was a hospital and described all of the good work the people inside the hospital do to make people well again. Upon graduating high school Barron enrolled in nursing school in Bangor and got her first full-time job at Eastern Medical Center after graduation in 1971.
In those days, short staffing wasn’t as much of a problem as it is today. She worked in an all-female medical ward with four bedrooms and would float back and forth between the mixed unit and the all-male ward below depending on where she was needed.
“Things were a lot less technical,” she recalled. “I hate to say it this way, but people didn’t survive back then who survive now because of technology.”
But she was also frustrated with the way nurses were treated and the unfairness of how work schedules were doled out. If you were close friends with supervisors, you got the raises and promotions. If you weren’t, you didn’t. Standards and expectations widely differed depending on which department you worked in and who your supervisor was.
“I felt there really needed to be some fairness and there wasn’t,” said Barron. “It didn’t matter what we said. They didn’t see us as bringing in any money. Everything revolved around the physicians.”
As Barron recalls, these long simmering grievances boiled over after an intensive care nurse with excellent reviews and impeccable credentials was fired because a physician didn’t like her. Shortly after, a nurse got a group of her close colleagues together for a spaghetti dinner to discuss forming a union and the movement grew from there.
A Very Brief History of Nurse Organizing
Following passage of the 1935 National Labor Relation Act (NLRA), which set up the process for union elections and required companies bargain with unions, there were a few successful nurse union drives here and there. But the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments to the NLRA passed by Congress excluded workers at private nonprofit hospitals from collective bargaining rights . In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order allowing workers at Federal hospitals to unionize. In 1966, workers at the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta defeated an independent union at the ballot box and formed American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2610.
In the meantime, twelve states (not including Maine) passed laws granting nurses at private non-profit hospitals collective bargaining rights. It wasn’t until 1974 that Congress amended the NLRA to expand these rights to health care workers nationwide. At the time, the Maine State Nurses Association (MSNA) was a professional organization affiliated with the American Nurses Association (ANA). Founded in 1896, ANA’s historic mission has been to protect the interests of nurses and improve nursing education and professional standards. It also occasionally joined the fight for labor rights like the eight-hour day. Gradually, ANA began to get into labor organizing as nurses gained collective bargaining rights. With the support of MSNA and ANA, the EMMC nurses developed a list of objectives for their new union and began organizing.
“None of us really knew what to do in the beginning,” said Barron in an interview for the book Maine Nursing: Interviews and History on Caring and Competence. "The American Nurses Association sent people to help us, figure out what we needed and how to get things going, how to get organized. We received a lot of help from other unions in the area. They were very helpful in terms of meeting with us about organizing and letting us use facilities for free. We had no money.”
The Maine AFL-CIO, Teamsters Local 340 and the local MEA teacher's union came to the union's aid, providing them with a meeting space and use of a photocopier.
In Come the Union Busters
However, the EMMC Board of Trustees and President Robert Brandow were not about to let a rag tag group of nurses build power in their hospital. Brandow joined the hospital as its first administrator with hospital management experience in 1969 and soon made a name for himself as a change agent.
As the Bangor Daily News noted in a tribute following his death in 2021, modern hospital administration was in its relative infancy in those days. Brandow applied his skills to oversee the hospital’s expansion, streamline operations and take its budget out of the red. He was also instrumental in creating the precursor to what is today the Northern Light health care system, a sprawling network of ten hospitals throughout the state.
A Northern Light spokesman remembered Brandow as a “visionary and gifted businessman.” But his corporate vision for the hospital did not include unions and he would do whatever it took to prevent them from taking root, even stretching the boundaries of legality. All of the other hospital administrators in Maine were tensely watching the events unfold at EMMC because they knew if MSNA won this round, they would be next.
Brandow was prepared to spend thousands of dollars to defeat the union and immediately hired the services of the notorious Modern Management Methods, known as 3M, the largest union busting firm in the country at the time. With over 70 employees, 3M took on roughly three dozen anti-union campaigns a month, specializing in health care, universities, banks and insurance companies. Its consultants received per diem fees of between $500 and $800 a day ($2,700 to $4,300 in current dollars adjusted for inflation ), plus expenses.
“Oh they were spending megabucks on union busting companies. We were fighting the world,” Barron recalled chuckling. “Just some nurses.”
One of 3M’s most famous consultants was Martin J. Levitt, who detailed the company’s unethical tactics and use of deception, intimidation and dirty tricks in his tell-all memoir Confessions of a Union Buster. As 3M founder Herbert Melnick told the New Republic in 1979, front-line supervisors were 3M's “primary tool” against union drives. They would misleadingly convince supervisors that a victory for the union would jeopardize their power and make them lose their ability to hire, fire and discipline workers. If the supervisor wasn’t willing to do the dirty work, they would find one who could and reward them for their loyalty.
Armed with stacks of anti-union literature, the supervisors were ordered to hold as many as 25 one-on-one meetings with each employee and report back to the consultant daily about the workers’ reactions. They also helped the anti-union workers organize against the union. Barron said that unlike the pro-union nurses, the anti-union nurses “seemed to have all kinds of free time” to talk to their coworkers while they were supposed to be on duty.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that they were being paid by the hospital to organize against the union,” she said.
3M’s signature tactics including firings and suspensions of union activists, surveillance, interrogation, isolation and harassment of pro-union workers with a constant flood of half truths and anti-union fear mongering. The opening salvo in 3M’s anti-union campaign against EMMC nurses was a letter informing them that the Board of Trustees “feel the best interest of the patients will not be served if the nurses turn to an outside party to represent them.”
“We understand Maine has been designated by the nursing association as a pilot or target state in a nationwide strategy to unionize nurses,” wrote Brandow. "This commitment of resources at a national level has come to the attention of the general public before, in the strike in San Francisco last fall.”
The inflammatory letter had 3M’s fingerprints all over it, from portraying the nurses’ union as a malevolent “outside party” to spreading fear that they would “lose their rights to the union.” MSNA soon filed a unfair labor practice with the NLRA over the “coercive and intimidating” letter. The nurses vehemently denied that the union drive was part of some kind of national effort. They were aided by a consultant from the American Nurses Association, but she had nothing to do with a strike in San Francisco.
“This is a direct attempt at the administration to subvert the legal rights of nurses to engage in the organizing process.” Said Shirley R. Knowles, MSNA spokesperson at an August press conference at the Labor Temple in Brewer. She added that the ANA consultant “who has been in Maine at our request for a total of four days in last five months, was never involved in the organizing effort in San Francisco. Mr. Brandow would be well advised to carefully check his sources before he repeats such wild rumors.”
The nurses denied that the EMMC RNs were getting any “money whatsoever” from ANA. MSNA’s Executive Director Patty Martin added, “We’re out selling bumper stickers to raise money” while the administration dips into petty cash to send money to all the nurses.”
Meanwhile, 3M’s deliberate strategy of sowing fear and confusion was creating an ever more toxic work environment. After learning that Barron was the “doing all the noise making and organizing,” a male neurosurgeon angrily confronted her.
“He came down the hall screaming, screaming at the desk. I couldn’t talk or say anything. And he got madder and madder and madder….we never did get along,” recalled Barron laughing. “I went through a lot of mostly yelling abuse. [The doctors] could do anything. Part of his problem was unions and part of his problem was women. Where he came from women didn’t really matter that much.”
Nevertheless, the nurses didn’t let the union busters distract them and continued quietly organizing. The mother of one of the nurses made blue ribbons for the RNs to wear and show their support for the union. They quickly learned their rights and what activity was protected and what wasn’t. They placed leaflets in non-patient areas, like on the backs of bathroom doors, though management followed closely behind, tearing them down as fast as they could put them up. One time Barron and some of her colleagues were thrown out by hospital security after they tried to catch nurses going off the clock and coming in for night duty at the shift change.
But filing for their union election also gave them some protections from retaliation. Barron remembered that one nurse, “a sweet little southern gal” who did not support the union, tried to call in sick one day. However, her supervisor demanded that she come to work anyway. She looked “deathly ill” as she dragged herself into work and asked Barron for a blue ribbon.
“She never got hassled again,” said Barron. “Whether she was pro-union or how she voted I don’t know, but they learned if they thought she was [pro-union] they weren’t going to hassle her.”
But they weren’t able to win over all of the nurses.
“What used to really kill me was when a nurse would say, ‘my husband says I can’t do this,’” said Barron. “Oh my God. Give me a break! My mother voted Democrat and my father voted Republican their whole lives and they got along.”
Barron thought the nurses should delay the election date so they could have more time to organize and build power, but others were antsy to get it over with. As the nurses mobilized, the hospital had also organized a squad of anti-union nurses to drive turn out.
“If they knew you were pro-hospital, by God they’d go and get you and bring you in on your day off to vote,” said Barron. “They had a whole group of anti-union nurses.”
When all of the votes were counted on March 19, 1976, the union won by just fourteen votes, 114 to 100 out of 226 eligible voters. Speaking to reporters, MSNA member Shirley Gallagher of Bangor said, “We’re very happy.” However, she added, “the vote was closer than we anticipated.”
Brandow responded that he was “glum” with the election results, but it was clear that the hospital was “obligated to work together cooperatively to see that the highest ideals of patient service are maintained throughout all future negotiations.”
The pro-union nurses had won the first round, but the fight was far from over as there were still plenty of opportunities to derail negotiations for the nurses’ first contract. A few weeks after losing the battle at EMMC, 3M successfully thwarted a union drive at Maine Medical Center in Portland and it was just getting warmed up for another fight at EMMC. It would be another five years of legal fights, hearings, a decertification and a recertification of the union before the EMMC RNs would win their first contract.