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.
