May 15, 2009:NWLP
5/12/09
10:09 AM
Page 8
SEIU fights for reinstatement
Nursing home worker fired after joining union campaign
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Elizabeth Lehr was well liked by her
managers at Laurelhurst Village senior
care community. Six months after her
summer 2007 hire as a receptionist,
Lehr got an “employee of the month”
plaque. She was recognized for her
“kind manner” and praised for answer-
ing the phone “with a smile in her
voice.” Lehr, 23, says she loved her job,
her co-workers, and the residents she
came to know, some of whom would
spend all day with her in the lobby of
the Southeast Portland assisted living
facility.
On April 2, she was fired — 10 days
after she got involved in a union cam-
paign.
That’s all too common in the United
States, where every year thousands of
workers are fired, illegally, for trying to
get union representation in the work-
place.
Lehr first learned there was a union
campaign when she overheard two of-
fice managers discussing it. Workers
were coming in when they weren’t
scheduled, the managers said, and talk-
ing to co-workers in the break room.
Later, a manager giving Lehr a ride
home remarked casually that dietary
Receptionist Elizabeth Lehr, one-
time “Employee of the Month,” was
fired 10 days after joining a
campaign to unionize Laurelhurst
Village nursing home.
aide Henry Olivera was involved with
the union campaign, and said he’d bet-
ter watch out.
Lehr decided to ask Olivera about
the union.
Service Employees International
Union Local 503 — a 45,000-member
statewide union of janitors, health care
workers, and public employees — rep-
resents workers at 26 Oregon nursing
homes. Its staff organizers had begun
meeting with workers at Laurelhurst
Village. Laurelhurst Village, 3060 SE
Stark, Portland, used to be Catholic-
owned Mt. St. Joseph, but was sold in
2004 to a for-profit company, Portland-
based Farmington Centers. Farmington
owns 16 nursing homes in three states,
including Farmington Square in
Beaverton, Gresham, and Tualatin, and
other locations.
Olivera, one of the earliest Laurel-
hurst Village workers to get involved in
the union campaign, helped arrange a
visit at her house from a union organ-
izer to explain the union campaign.
Lehr says unionizing sounded reason-
able to her.
“I felt it was the best avenue for us to
have a living wage and benefits that we
deserve, and have a voice to advocate
for residents,” Lehr told the Northwest
Labor Press.
Lehr agreed to join the organizing
committee, and started talking to co-
workers. A week later, her first public
act in support of the union tipped off
management to her sympathies. Lehr
and four other workers made an unan-
nounced visit to Laurelhurst Village
CEO Hannah Austin to protest the un-
explained suspension of a pro-union co-
worker.
Two days after that, April 1, Lehr
came in on a day off to distribute fliers
in the break room during shift change,
taking care to hand them only to work-
ers who were off the clock. In walked
the site administrator, the second-in-
command manager at Laurelhurst Vil-
lage. Managers have their own break
area, Lehr says, and until the union
campaign were seldom seen in the
break room used by workers. The ad-
ministrator, maybe to justify her pres-
ence there, made a big show of looking
for coffee, Lehr said, not knowing that
the coffee maker there had been broken
for a long time. Lehr figured the admin-
istrator was there to conduct surveil-
lance. But Lehr wasn’t intimidated. She
continued distributing fliers to workers
until another manager told her to leave.
Lehr argued that she had a right to be
there, since the company had allowed
off-shift workers on the premises in the
past.
In any case, shift change was over.
You
Lehr left the break room, and sat on a
couch in the lobby of the skilled nursing
building, waiting for a friend to get off
work. But again the manager appeared,
and ordered her to leave.
“What will happen to me if I stay?”
Lehr remembers asking. Lehr found
out: The police would be called. A pair
of officers arrived (one of them a police
union rep, Lehr says). Lehr left rather
than be arrested for trespass.
When Lehr returned to work, she
was called into a meeting with her su-
pervisor, a human resources manager,
and the CEO. She was called insubordi-
nate for having lingered in the lobby;
told she’d been “physically aggressive”
during the employee delegation to the
CEO; and accused of copying pay-
checks to get names of employees the
union could talk to. She denied the ac-
cusations, but was fired anyway, es-
corted off the property, and banned
from the facility.
For Lehr, it was a heavy blow. Lau-
relhurst Village contested her unem-
ployment claim. She’s jobless in a
tough job market, and worries that be-
ing fired for unionizing will be a stain
on her employment record, something
hard to explain on future job applica-
(Turn to Page 7)
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NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
MAY 15, 2009