Letter to Prime Healthcare CEO Prem Reddy
Over 60 local and state elected officials have signed on to the following letter calling on Prime Healthcare to end its retaliation against nurses who are organizing and advocating for their patients.
Dr. Prem Reddy, MD, FACC, FCCP
Chairman, Founder, and CEO
Prime Healthcare Services
3480 E. Guasti Road
Ontario, CA 91761
To Prime Healthcare CEO Prem Reddy:
We, the undersigned elected officials, representing communities across the country at the state and local level, write to you with serious concern and growing outrage over Prime Healthcare management’s escalating interference with the registered nurses’ efforts to organize their workplace for better patient care.
It has come to our attention that nurses have faced a sustained campaign to stop or interfere with their organizing efforts, from unpaid suspensions and terminations to management calling the police department on nurses and National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU) organizers exercising their lawful right to engage in lawfully protected concerted union activity. Nurses who work at Prime Healthcare facilities should not be retaliated against for engaging in union activity and advocating for their patients, which has long been protected under our labor laws. The necessary first step is clear: reinstate every nurse who has been disciplined or fired, with full back pay. Until that happens, we do not see a productive basis for further conversation with Prime management.
Prime Healthcare operates 55 hospitals across 15 states. How this company treats nurses in one facility is how it will treat nurses—and patients—in every community it enters, including ours. Prime Healthcare has now crossed a new line to stop the unionization of a workforce and to chill nurses who live and care for our communities from advocating for us as their patients. These actions demonstrate Prime management's consistent, systematic efforts to stop the unionization of registered nurses and to chill union activity in multiple hospitals within the Prime Healthcare system. This kind of retaliation against workers for union activity is clearly prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Elected leaders like us, and the communities we represent, value the rights and voices of workers organizing collectively for a safer workplace. We cannot and will not stand by while a hospital corporation intimidates and retaliates against the very workers our communities depend on most.
Registered nurses at Prime Healthcare facilities across the country – including nurses seeking to unionize in Olympia Fields, Saint Francis, and Central Maine Medical Center and unionized nurses at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno – are fighting to ensure these hospitals can provide the very best care to our communities while being short-staffed, lacking supplies, and facing patient care concerns that are dismissed or ignored by management. We wholeheartedly support the right of registered nurses to organize a union and bargain collectively. When nurses can speak out without the fear of retaliation and are protected by a labor union, they can better advocate for their patients. When they are silenced, patients pay the price.
We call on Prime Healthcare to immediately reinstate all nurses with full back pay, respect registered nurses' right to organize free from management interference, harassment, or intimidation, and end its anti-union campaign by promptly meeting with the union to begin negotiations in good faith.
Reinstatement is the starting point. Hospitals operate on public trust—the trust of health care workers who provide the care, the patients who walk through your doors, the communities that depend on your services, and the elected officials who answer to all of them. Retaliating against nurses for advocating for patient care diminishes that trust in every state where Prime operates. Until these nurses are back at work and made whole, we are not in a position to engage with Prime on other matters or to lend our support to your work in our communities. Bringing these registered nurses back to work is how we can start to rebuild that trust.
The nurses in Prime Healthcare hospitals have our full support and solidarity. We are watching closely, and we expect your prompt response.
Sincerely,
Hannah Pingree, Democratic Nominee for Governor, Maine
Mattie Daughtry, President, Maine State Senate, District 22
Ryan Fecteau, Speaker, Maine House of Representatives, District 132
Mike Tipping, Maine State Senator, District 8
Nicole Grohoski, Maine State Senator, District 10
Chip Curry, Maine State Senator, District 11
Anne Beebe-Center, Maine State Senator, District 12
Craig Hickman, Maine State Senator, District 14
Margaret Rotundo, Maine State Senator, District 21
Denise Tepler, Maine State Senator, District 24
Timothy Nangle, Maine State Senator, District 26
Donna Bailey, Maine State Senator, District 31
Henry Ingwersen, Maine State Senator, District 32
Joseph Rafferty, Maine State Senator, District 34
Matt Moonen, Majority Leader, Maine State Representative, District 117
Lori K. Gramlich, Assistant Majority Leader, Maine State Representative, District 131
Gary Friedmann, Maine State Representative, District 14
Ambureen Rana, Maine State Representative, District 21
Amy Roeder, Maine State Representative, District 23
Sean Faircloth, Maine State Representative, District 24
Ann Higgins Matlack, Maine State Representative, District 43
Bill Pluecker, Maine State Representative, District 44
Lydia Crafts, Maine State Representative, District 46
Holly Stover, Maine State Representative, District 48
Allison Hepler, Maine State Representative, District 49
David A. Sinclair, Maine State Representative, District 50
Rafael Macias, Maine State Representative, District 51
Sally Cluchey, Maine State Representative, District 52
Tavis Rock Hasenfus, Maine State Representative, District 57
Julie McCabe, Maine State Representative, District 93
Kilton Webb, Maine State Representative, District 98
Cheryl A. Golek, Maine State Representative, District 99
Dan Ankeles, Maine State Representative, District 100
Poppy Arford, Maine State Representative, District 101
Melanie Sachs, Maine State Representative, District 102
Anne Graham, Maine State Representative, District 105
Parnell Terry, Maine State Representative, District 108
Christina Mitchell, Maine State Representative, District 110
Sam Zager, Maine State Representative, District 116
Deqa Dhalac, Maine State Representative, District 120
Matthew Beck, Maine State Representative, District 122
Laurie Osher, Maine State Representative, District 123
Sophie Warren, Maine State Representative, District 124
Drew Gattine, Maine State Representative, District 126
Suzanne Salisbury, Maine State Representative, District 128
Marshall Archer, Maine State Representative, District 129
Lynn Copeland, Maine State Representative, District 130
Marc Malon, Maine State Representative, District 133
Daniel Sayra, Maine State Representative, District 135
Annie-Marie Mastraccio, Maine State Representative, District 142
Michele Meyer, Maine State Representative, District 150
Kristi Mathieson, Maine State Representative, District 151
Jeffrey Harmon, Mayor, Auburn, Maine
Rachel Randall, City Councilor (Ward 1), Auburn, Maine
Tim Cowan, City Councilor (Ward 2), Auburn, Maine
Mathie Duvall, City Councilor (Ward 3), Auburn, Maine
Kelly Butler, City Councilor (Ward 4), Auburn, Maine
Adam Platz, City Councilor, Auburn, Maine
Charles Louis Simms III, City Councilmember, Gorham, Maine
Lilian Jimenez, Illinois State Representative, District 4
Lindsey LaPointe, Illinois State Representative, District 19
Jessica Vasquez, Commissioner (8th District), Cook County, Illinois
Selena LaRue-Hatch, Nevada State Representative, District 25
Devon T. Reese, Councilmember (Ward 5), Reno, Nevada
Cc: Peter J. Adamo, Chief Executive Officer, Saint Francis Hospital
Von Crockett, Chief Executive Officer, Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital
Leonard Freeof, Chief Executive Officer, Saint Joseph Medical Center
Derrick Glum, Chief Executive Officer, Saint Mary’s Health Network
Sam Itani, Chief Executive Officer, Shasta Regional Medical Center
Luis Leon, Chief Executive Officer, Olympia Fields Hospital
Ayman Mousa, Chief Executive Officer, West Anaheim Medical Center
Allen Stefanek, Chief Executive Officer, Central Maine Healthcare