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With God on Our Side: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a Catholic Hospital

In this short but engaging volume, Adam Reich pursues fundamental issues concerning union organizing campaigns. His empirical focus is the sustained effort to unionize the staff of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital (SRMH) in California, stretching from 2004– 2010, which ultimately yielded success. He closely examines how organizers eventually found a fruitful path to speak both to the hearts and minds of the staff and one that nurtured a broad community coalition. The case study is based on extensive field work and access to a wide array of documentation. The lucidly presented lesson is that winning campaigns must fashion a larger vision of empowered labor, one that speaks to workers’ vocational morals and emotional investments and successfully wrestles with managerial culture. Reich draws eclectically from several literatures, but importantly builds from Hochschild’s concept of the managed heart. He argues that workers have some autonomy from management in the ways they conceive of their occupational and emotional commitments. Through the martyred heart, hospital workers see their devaluation as a sacrifice for the larger good. Those with a misrecognized heart understand their travails as resistance against increasing bureaucratic and market control. Alternatively, organizers must cultivate the mobilized heart, by which workers see unionization providing them with increased capacity to validate their vocational ethics and emotional investments. Reich persuasively argues that SRMH is a signal case for the dynamics of the mobilized heart, because it was part of a larger system controlled by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. The Sisters had a deep legacy of sacrifice and social justice activism. The martyred heart of hospital labor resonated with the Sisters’ message of spiritual commitment, and their legacy endured even as they ceded operational control to professional managers. As management cut staff, instituted speed ups, and marketized care, staff viewed their persisting commitment through the misrecognized heart. Some workers finally reached out to the SEIU-UHW, and by the fall of 2004 organizers were pursuing an energetic campaign. To allay fears of militant unionism, and entwine economic and vocational concerns, organizers focused on the union as an empowering vehicle for ‘‘voice.’’ Staff in disparate departments read their differing issues into the campaign and cast the union as defending occupational commitment against bureaucratic rationalization. Worker response was rapid and largely enthusiastic, and two-thirds of the staff signed a petition for a union vote. Unionization, however, involved complex theological issues. While Catholic doctrine contained significant pronouncements supporting workers’ rights, the Sisters and their ethicists viewed the union’s efforts as an assault on their theological mission of sacrifice for the greater good. Hospital management responded with an aggressive, professional anti-management campaign that portrayed the SEIU as materialist interlopers pushing adversarial politics that would undermine the care culture. Drawing on the full array of campaign tactics they eroded support within a few weeks, and the union withdrew its request for an election to regroup. After a brief foray with a ‘‘political’’ strategy concerning community access to health care, the union brought in two seasoned organizers to pursue a fair election agreement. Critically, organizers elicited support of key local and national theologians. Through their voices organizers won public contests, both locally and nationally, representing unionization as consonant with Catholic teachings. Locally these ties also fostered vital relations in the community campaign and were a conduit to the Sisters. Organizers also carefully cultivated workers’ narratives publicly, highlighting their commitments. After two years of steady campaigning the Sisters consented to a fair labor agreement for the entire system. In his final analytic chapter, Reich explores tensions between top-down and bottom-up 252 Reviews