Bay Area Hospice Workers Vote to Unionize

Workers at a San Francisco Bay Area hospice facility voted on Nov. 3 to unionize, advancing a labor movement that is growing in the end-of-life care industry. Hospice East Bay employees voted 56-15 to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), becoming the sixth hospice workplace in California to unionize in the last year. Workers at the nonprofit agency, based in Pleasant Hill, California, had launched the organizing drive in response to what they characterized as an increased emphasis on productivity that threatened patient care and made their caseloads unmanageable. (Disclosure: NUHW is a financial supporters of Capital & Main.) 

The newly organized group includes social workers, nurses, bereavement and spiritual care counselors, and music therapists.

“Management has made so many changes without staff input that have been really detrimental to patient care,” said Claire Eustace, a spiritual care counselor at Hospice East Bay since 2019, and who helped lead the union drive. “We think that with bargaining power we can help set the work environment and make it better for clinicians to do our jobs.”

Hospice East Bay management had opposed the union. In response to a request for comment, Bill Musick, Hospice East Bay’s Interim President, forwarded a message he sent to staff, which stated that once the vote was formally certified, negotiations for a first contract would begin, and also thanked staff for “continuing to focus on excellent patient care during this challenging time.”

As Capital & Main previously reported, hospice has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, with for-profit companies now making up more than 72% of the industry. A 2019 study found that for-profit hospices provided only one-third the number of physician or nurse practitioner visits as their nonprofit counterparts and just half the number of therapy visits. Notably, all of the recently unionized California hospice workplaces are nonprofits where workers say they are fighting back against the industry-wide trends of increasing caseloads, shrinking time with patients and short-staffing.

The victory at Hospice East Bay follows an unprecedented wave of union drives in California during the past year, which includes hospice workers at Providence in Sonoma County and Sutter Health in San Mateo, Alameda and Sacramento — all of whom joined NUHW. Eustace, the spiritual care counselor, first reached out to the union after reading online about the San Mateo campaign.

“Hospice workers throughout California are taking note of these victories and realizing that as the hospice industry becomes more corporatized, they need the power of a union,” said Sal Rosselli, NUHW President. “They’re determined to have a voice in their workplace to advocate for themselves and the families they serve.”

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