The Limits of the Law: The Rise and Collapse of the Hospital Unionization Wave of the 1970s

Pablo Gaston, University of Michigan

This paper examines hospital worker organizing in the wake of the 1974 amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. The 1974 reform incorporate hospital workers under federal labor law for the first time in a generation. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had stripped workers in nonprofit hospitals from coverage under the act, which had throttled organizing efforts in the sector for three decades. The 1974 amendments opened the door for the organization of hospital workers throughout the country. Over the next few years, however, other hospital unions failed to organize many workers—indeed, in California they grew more slowly than they had in the years immediately before 1974, outside the purview of the NLRA. Using extensive archival and interview data, I examine how two California labor unions and a nurses’ professional association responded to the 1974 opening. I find that organizational responses were driven by clashes between preexisting occupational boundaries and the boundaries established by Taft-Hartley. Prior to 1974, organizing and bargaining customs evolved within the peculiar workplace structure of the non-profit hospital. Nurses resisted alliances across occupational lines, and built cross-class coalitions within occupational boundaries. The NLRA, however, had defined bargaining units on the basis of class boundaries. Legal disjuncture between the existing boundaries and those defined under the NLRA created critical obstacles for hospital organizing in the late 1970s. Union-avoidance consultants learned to use bargaining unit disputes to delay or avoid NLRB elections. In the United States, these procedural tools served as critical instruments of de-unionization in the 1980s and since. This analysis illustrates how and boundary drawing projects in the workplace shaped the early years of the crisis of collective bargaining in the United States, while adding necessary context to current debates concerning institutionalized labor conflict in contemporary capitalism.

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 Presented in Session 110. Organizing the Professions