Stop Bashing Unions
Conservatives blame unions for everything — but new data show that unionized nursing homes had 30% lower mortality rates than non-unionized ones.
This story was written by Julia Rock.

Unions have been the punching bag for the American right for decades — no matter what the societal problem, conservatives’ first scapegoat is organized labor. But if you or a relative were in a nursing home when the coronavirus pandemic hit, you would probably want to be in one whose workers were unionized — because new data suggests you’d have a better chance of surviving the disease.
The study by researchers at George Washington University and the medical schools at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University found that nursing homes in New York state that were staffed by unionized healthcare workers saw COVID mortality rates among residents that were 30 percent lower than those in non-unionized nursing homes.
The data confirms what a body of scholarship has already shown: Patient outcomes are better when the workers taking care of them are members of unions. The findings are especially significant, because New York state nursing homes were the epicenter of the pandemic for the period of time this spring that the study authors looked at.
More than 6,600 people living in nursing homes in the state have died of COVID-19, a number that doesn’t include people who were transported from nursing homes to hospitals and died there, and therefore severely understates the COVID-19 mortality rate among nursing home residents.
Now, state officials in New York are attempting to absolve themselves of blame for the second-highest nursing home death rate in the country.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s health department issued a report in July saying that Cuomo’s own directive to send COVID-19 infected patients from hospitals into nursing homes wasn’t a large factor in the transmission rate, instead blaming transmission on workers. But workers struggled to gain access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) -- a key factor in stopping transmission -- and especially those workers without unions.
This new study shows that blaming workers for transmission couldn’t be more wrong: People were less likely to die when workers had more power.
While the study concluded a strong correlation between nursing home staff unions and mortality rates, it wasn’t conducted in a manner to draw causal conclusions. But the authors put forward multiple theories about why unionized nursing homes were safer.
For one, the study found that unionized nursing homes had an 11.5 percent higher chance of having access to PPE in the early days of the outbreak than those without unionized workers.
“For six months now, people have been talking about PPE and worker safety and how to protect essential workers,” study co-author Adam Dean, a professor of political science at George Washington University who studies unions, told TMI. “But there hasn’t been that much talk about labor unions. It’s almost as if people have forgotten that one of the main things that unions do is fight for safer working conditions.”
And in the case of COVID-19, Dean said, worker safety directly translates to resident safety, because workers protecting themselves against COVID-19 means they are less likely to transmit the virus to others. “Nursing home unions demanded PPE to protect healthcare workers,” Dean said. “But better access to PPE also meant that fewer workers got sick, and that fewer nursing home residents therefore received care from infected workers.”
Study co-author Atheendar Venkataramani, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, suggested another possibility: Perhaps unionized nursing homes were able to limit transfer between residents by successfully preventing COVID-19 positive patients from being brought in to the facilities from hospitals or other facilities.
Venkataramani said that the results of the study reflect what experts already knew to be true in normal times; that when healthcare workers have better pay and more control over the conditions of their workplaces, patient outcomes are better.
Dean also pointed to a larger takeaway from the study that deserves attention, which is that unions make society safer on the whole. “The benefits of labor unions were not just for healthcare workers or even just for nursing home residents,” Dean said, “they’re for everyone. The fact that unions were associated with lower COVID-19 infection and death rates in the epicenter of the pandemic -- nursing homes in the State of New York -- really speaks to the broader societal benefits of labor unions.”
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I've been keeping a list of news stories on the web about nursing home cautionary tales. I'm glad to add one that is more positive than the rest of my list, as well as the family horror stories that I know of. But here is one thing people can ask about in sifting through available nursing homes - is your staff unionized.
Also people should know about for profit hospice services. I served briefly as a Lay Eucharistic Minister at one such. I didn't know they were not non-profit until I started encountering things I questioned. After I found out that the service was for-profit, I did a search online about the phenomenon. I found out that the US government was frequently requiring these services to repay monies that they received from Medicaid. You see, hospice services are supposedly for people who have up to six months to live. But the hospice service was recruiting nursing homes to seek care for patients with dementia. The problem with this was that dementia patients frequently have a tenacious hold on life whether you like it or not. So apparently, according to one article I read, a vicious circle started where in order to pay Medicaid back, they had to recruit new patients to bring in new Medicaid funds. (I wish I had kept the link to the article - but this was over 8 years ago.)
What started me asking questions: I was sent to a new patient. I arrived when she was being bathed by the hospice care aide (to be clear, the aide was an employee of the hospice service, not the nursing home). I was shocked to find her bathing this 90 year old woman without closing the curtain around her bed. The woman was in tears. I was trying to pull the curtain closed behind me and to comfort the woman as best I could, while the aide was fighting me the entire time. When the ordeal was over and the aide left, I sat in a chair next the bed, holding the woman's hand while we were both crying. Finally, the older woman stopped crying, patting my hand to tell me it was time to stop crying.
The aide was waiting for me in the hall when I left the patient. She was furious. She said, "You think hospice care is so wonderful, but they only give me 20 minutes to bathe each patient. The staff here is supposed to help me, but when they see me coming, they disappear." This was practically spat at me.
I went home worrying about both women. - And went looking for information on For Profit Hospice Care. After reading about the vicious debt circle that the Hospice Care company put itself in, I came to suspect that Hospice Care on one hand told the Nursing Homes a happy story, but subtly pitched it as "extra hands" - which is not what hospice care is.
Not all my experiences were bad - if your family had the money to pay, hospice care was what it should be. But that is not what the ideal of hospice care is.
I should also mention here, that not all my experiences were like this.
I teach about marginalization. It starts with stereotypes that paint the group in a very negative and scary light (people are much more easily coerced when frightened). Racists have done it for centuries. Especially in the 60's these stereotypes started (or blew up) regarding Unions: they are all run by mob bosses, they screw their members over, and the union bosses are thieves. It also made anti-union employers quicker to stifle any organization by employees. Rather than stop corruption when it's found, anti-union advocates just sing the stereotypes.