Religious leaders work to HALT harassment of nurses

[Omaha Steve]

Religious leaders visited Our Lady of the Resurrection Medical Center (OLR) last week to deliver a message to a top doctor who has been harassing nurses seeking to form a union.

Over the past two months, as support for AFSCME representation has grown (see today's New York Times article on the union election), Dr. Shirish Shah, director of the medical staff at OLR, has launched an intensive effort to dissuade nurses from supporting the union. He’s been cornering nurses, demanding to know how they intend to vote in the upcoming union election and telling them that he will take his patients elsewhere if nurses vote for a union.

Most recently he has been distributing “vote no” T-shirts on which AFSCME is written in Halloween-ish blood-dripping red!

Several religious leaders attempted to meet with Dr. Shah at his office last week and left a clear message expressing their concern about his coercive tactics. They also hand-delivered letters from nurses to OLR Human Resources department and the hospital CEO, Martin Judd, calling for management to halt Dr. Shah’s harassment.

But rather than addressing the nurses’ complaints of harassment, OLR management circulated a flyer blasting the nurses for filing a complaint and redoubling their effort to stop nurses from talking to one another by attacking nurses who support the union.

NYT story Finally, Nurses Are Set to Vote on Unionizing: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/us/24cncwarren.html?_r=2