Fox Chase Cancer Center techs vote to unionize. The center’s nurses could be next.
Nurses at Fox Chase will have a unionization vote on June 20.
Technical staff at the Fox Chase Cancer Center voted to unionize on Wednesday, becoming the latest group of health-care workers in Philadelphia to start negotiating with a hospital for a collective bargaining agreement.
More than three-quarters of the group voted in Wednesday’s election, which was administered by the National Labor Relations Board, and 74% voted in favor of unionization. The 125 techs — including X-ray techs and therapists, surgical techs, and licensed practical nurses — will be represented by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, or PASNAP.
“We couldn’t be happier,” said Nancy McIntyre, an X-ray tech who has worked at Fox Chase for more than 20 years. “Now we have a voice.”
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PASNAP also represents nurses at Temple University Hospital and the Jeanes Campus, as well as a joint unit of certified registered nurse anesthetists who work at both Fox Chase and Jeanes. Temple’s Jeanes Campus is adjacent to Fox Chase in Northeast Philly.
Roughly 400 nurses who work at Fox Chase are expected to vote on whether to unionize later this month.
Jeremy Moore, a Fox Chase spokesperson, acknowledged the techs’ vote in an emailed statement.
“We respect their decision and look forward to a fruitful negotiation as we work toward a contract that will benefit both the mission and patients at Fox Chase Cancer Center,” Moore said.
It’s been an active year for labor organizing in the Philadelphia region, and nationally, including in the medical field. High demand for health-care staffers during a workforce shortage have given motivation to workers who are trying to unionize and leverage to already unionized workers trying to negotiate better contracts.
In November, unionized nurses and technical workers at Temple University won a three-year contract that included new staffing standards and security requirements at Temple hospital entrances. Other nurses in Pennsylvania reportedly took note, with intention to make similar demands next time they sat at the bargaining table.
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The nurses at Einstein Medical Center, which is part of Jefferson Health, have been without a contract since the end of April. They have been holding pickets and negotiating since.
Resident physicians at the University of Pennsylvania Health System made history in May when they became the first group of training doctors — referred to in the industry as house staff — in Pennsylvania to form a union. Their bargaining unit also became the largest new union in Philadelphia since the 1970s.
Nurses and techs in solidarity
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.
As the institution has grown, its character as a community hospital has changed, McIntyre said. The number of patients that techs and nurses see increased while the number of full-time workers declined, she said, which meant staff were less able to form meaningful bonds with patients. Both the techs and the nurses worry that lower staffing levels will increase the risk of errors and reduce the quality of care patients receive.
“Our workload has gotten a lot more, and we seem to be losing techs,” McIntyre said. “We want a competitive wage so techs will stay.”
The techs and nurses began discussing unionizing as a way to address their concerns last summer.
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“Temple is like a big corporation, and we felt like we kind of got lost in the system,” said Heather Davis, an interventional radiology nurse at Fox Chase. “We had frustrations and concerns, and we felt that they were falling on deaf ears.”
Fox Chase pushed back against unionization and argued that problems could be addressed without organizing, McIntyre and Davis said.
On Wednesday night, after the tech’s union vote results were announced, McIntyre went with other techs to have a celebratory drink. As she left the bar, she saw a mass email from Fox Chase CEO Robert Uzzo acknowledging the vote and saying he looks forward to working together as a team on the next steps.
“Hopefully that’s true,” she said.