Juana Delvalle has been a certified nurse assistant for 16 years -- and for six years at Marquis Hope Village, a 50-bed nursing facility in Canby. Since she started her job, Delvalle said, working conditions have steadily gotten worse.
"The biggest issue is low staffing," she said. While staffing ratios at the facility meet the required ratio of one staff per seven patients, Delville said residents need more care than that. "According to the law, we're good, but the acuity of residents is really high."
For instance, she and her coworkers don't usually have enough time to do restorative care, referring to staff-assisted walks or other exercises that some residents need to stay healthy.
"It gets to a point where they can't walk anymore, because they haven't been walking," Delville said, adding that staff are also sometimes too busy to respond to residents' call lights in a timely manner, which means their needs go unmet.
Earlier this year, Delvalle and several of her coworkers contacted a former employee who now works at a unionized facility and who in turn put them in touch with an organizer for the Service Employees International Union.
"We are not pushing for a traditional union drive," said Kari Koch, an organizer with SEIU Local 503's A Better Marquis campaign. Where organizing drives sometimes move quickly and stealthily, the A Better Marquis campaign has been very public, with workers sharing their stories on a website, and they initiated two petitions -- one just inside the workplace.
In September, the union sent a letter to the CEO, which Koch said garnered 475 signatures -- many from family members of workers and residents.
"We're trying to debunk this idea of, 'What happens in the workplace stays in the workplace.' This is a part of how we treat people in the community," Koch said. "One big piece of it is it's beyond a few workers saying that they have a grievance. This is also about how we want to treat elders, how we want to treat others."
Delvalle said once the company learned that workers were in touch with the union, managers encouraged them to speak out about their concerns and said they’d try to work things out. The managers even re-introduced the company’s Christmas party -- which hadn't happened for a few years due to budget cuts -- and gave staff raises. Blanca Pieuger told The Lund Report she received a $3.50 per hour raise.
Kathy LeVee, vice president of operations for Marquis Companies, said staff at all the Marquis locations -- not just Hope Village -- received raises in October because Medicaid reimbursement rates went up by 21 percent after increases were frozen for two years.
Mike McCormick, deputy director of the Department of Human Services' Aging and Disabilities office, confirmed that Medicaid-eligible nursing facilities throughout the state received an increase in reimbursement rates on July 1. The increase was particularly high because reimbursement rates had been well below what they should have been, according to Oregon statute, he said.
"Then in this last session, there was legislation to reauthorize the provider tax," McCormick said. "Part of that deal was bringing everything back to where it should have been."
For several years prior to the recent increase, wage increases were frozen at 2 percent per year, LeVee said, adding that the company had been planning on raising wages substantially after the Medicaid reimbursement rate went up.
"Our decision to lift that 2 percent limit and revise our wage scale was well underway before they came into our building or talked to our staff," LeVee said. All the Marquis facilities are dually-certified Medicare/Medicaid facilities, and have a large number of Medicaid patients.
"There has not been a formal petition," LeVee said of the union drive, which is only supported by a small percentage of employees at Hope Village. While staffing ratios are always a concern for management, she said its ratios are consistently in the top 30 percent in the state.
Delvalle and SEIU staff said the company brought in a labor relations attorney from California, who spent two weeks at the Canby site talking to workers about unions, often working alongside them in the kitchen or laundry room.
"He said he was a lawyer and used to work for the union. He said he was there to explain how the union works, how long the process takes," Delvalle said.
The company has talked with legal counsel, but has not had them visit their facilities. “We haven't gone out and hired legal counsel specifically about the efforts of the SEIU," LeVee said.
SEIU organizer Henry Olivera said it is common for management to offer raises or other perks when workers try to organize, but he hasn’t seen raises as high as those at Hope Village -- which amount to hundreds of dollars more per month for full-time staff. While he intends to continue involving the community in organizing and possibly voting to unionize at some point, staff members’ lives have already changed for the better, he said.
“I’ve heard some stories from other workers saying this has changed their lives,” Olivera said of Delvalle and her colleagues’ efforts. “They should be very proud.”
According to Olivera, more than 40 of Oregon’s 140 nursing homes are unionized.
The fact that Medicaid funds are involved is one of the reasons the union has chosen to make this campaign public. “We as the public have a right to say what happens with this money when public money is involved,” Koch said.
Christen can be reached at [email protected].
