Fox Chase nurses who answer patient phone calls want to join the center’s new nurses union
The nurses at the Temple-owner cancer center unionized in June. Twenty-one nurses who answer patient calls were left out of the bargaining unit.
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The nurses who answer the phone calls of concerned patients at Fox Chase Cancer Center filed paperwork to join a union last week. They would be the third group of workers at the Northeast Philadelphia hospital to unionize since June.
The 21 nurses were excluded from the much-larger group of 350 registered nurses at Fox Chase who voted to unionize in June.
The phone triage nurses planned to unionize with the rest of the center’s nursing staff, but hospital management argued that they should be a separate bargaining unit because they do not physically care for patients, said Rossana Caputo, one of the phone nurses at Fox Chase.
Caputo and her peers worried that fighting the decision would delay and jeopardize the vote for the rest of the nurses.
“We had a really good momentum,” Caputo said. “We didn’t want to lose that.”
» READ MORE: Fox Chase nurses vote to unionize, inspired by Temple’s contract. ‘We can have those things, too!’
The phone triage nurses submitted a petition to join the collective bargaining unit with the National Labor Review Board last week. She hopes that management will agree to a quick election, in which she believes a yes vote for the union will be close to unanimous.
Fox Chase is one of two National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in Philadelphia and has been part of the Temple University Health System since 2012. The hospital did not respond to request for comment.
Two weeks before the nurses’ election in June, 125 techs and licensed practical nurses at Fox Chase voted to unionize. In January, a union of 35 certified registered nurse anesthetists working both at Fox Chase and at the nearby Temple University Hospital-Jeanes Campus ratified their first contract.
Techs and nurses cited staffing levels, retention of employees, and benefits as their motivation to organize. The phone triage nurses share these concerns.
“We definitely want to be included,” Caputo said. “We want more of a voice.”