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December 4, 2003All contested union ballots to be countedThe vote itself is now the only debated issueByRecord-Eagle staff writer PETOSKEY - All 165 disputed ballots in the Northern Michigan Hospital nurses union election last month will be counted on Dec. 8. Hospital management, Teamsters Local 406 and nurses who filed petitions for the election agreed to count all contested ballots, said Stephen Glasser, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board. Nurses voted Nov. 13 on whether to retain the Teamsters union as their bargaining representative for another year. The tally was 178 votes to remove the Teamsters and 156 votes to retain. But 165 ballots were challenged - 136 by either hospital management or working nurse Laura Hart and the rest by the Teamsters. The contested ballots will be counted Monday at the NLRB's regional office in Grand Rapids, Glasser said. If all hospital/working nurse challenges opposed the unionization and all Teamster/striking nurse challenges supported it, the final tally could end up 292-207 in favor of the union. "The (striking) nurses are very confident that we will be successful," Teamsters attorney Ted Iorio said. If the union prevails, nurses will have another year with the Teamsters as their exclusive bargaining representative. NMH spokesman Thomas Spencer said hospital management initiated the offer Wednesday to count all ballots. "This could have taken a very long time, and our nurses deserve an outcome to the election," he said. "We don't believe that protracted litigation will serve the best interests of the hospital, our employees or the community." Iorio said the ballots contested by the union include about 40 "clearly ineligible voters" who likely voted against retaining the Teamsters. But the union agreed to allow those ballots because it is confident of prevailing, he said. A hearing set for Monday in Petoskey has now been postponed. Originally, the NLRB planned to begin taking testimony and evidence on the contested ballots. The hearing now will start Thursday and will deal solely with the hospital's objection to the Nov. 13 election, he said. Spencer said hospital management's objection is not intended to delay an outcome, but to make sure the vote occurred fairly and properly. "We have a number of concerns about how the election was conducted," he said. Management's objections include that working nurses were intimidated, threatened, coerced or restrained from voting; that the NLRB favored the pro-union side; and that it improperly denied working nurses the right to vote by mail. Iorio has called those allegations "ludicrous." Spencer said a hearing on the hospital's objections probably will take one day. Individual challenges to ballots probably would have delayed an outcome to the vote by weeks or months, he said.
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