Workers claim home care agencies engaging in ‘toxic and immoral anti-union campaign’

Two Las Vegas home care agencies hired an anti-labor consultant to pressure workers and thwart ongoing attempts to unionize, according to local organizers.

SEIU Local 1107 in late November alleged that two home care agencies, A Helping Hand and Everyday Miracles, hired Las Vegas-based anti-union consulting firm H. Sanford Rudnick & Associates “to spread fear, lies and division among workers in an attempt to stop them from voting to join a union.”

Home care workers at both agencies had requested union elections through the National Labor Relations Board.

The Nevada Current reached out to A Helping Hand and Everyday Miracles for a comment on the accusations of attempted union busting. Everyday Miracles in a brief email Tuesday did not directly respond to any accusations but said the company “let Sandy go,” referring to Sanford Rudnick, who goes by Sandy. The statement did not elaborate but acknowledged that the union vote is forthcoming.

Everyday Miracles employees will be sent ballots this week, according to a NLRB notice, with ballots due back in early January. The NLRB lists Everyday Miracles as having 184 employees, though the union being sought would only include personal care assistants.

A Helping Hand did not respond to the Current’s requests for comment. Employees there were sent election ballots via mail Thanksgiving Week, according to a NLRB notice, and ballots are due back next week. The company employs 75 people.

Rudnick, the consultant, did not respond to a request for comment on his association with the home care agencies. But the firm boasts on its website of having defeated more than 1,000 union elections across four decades and promises it can provide clients with “a video to convince your employees to vote against a union in 15 minutes.”

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers nationwide spend at least $433 million annually on union-busting efforts. One common strategy used is to hold coercive one-on-one or group “captive audience meetings,” wherein employers, managers or high-priced consultants express anti-union sentiments, such as issuing hyperbolic warnings that a union will cause the entire business to collapse or misleading workers about the cost of union dues.

The NLRB last month ruled that captive audience meetings are now prohibited when employees are required to attend them under threat of discipline or discharge. Requiring attendance “demonstrates the employer’s economic power over its employees and reasonably tends to inhibit them from acting freely in exercising their rights,” read a NLRB release summarizing the ruling.

Employers can still hold meetings to encourage the rejection of union representation but such meetings must be voluntarily attended by workers with no threat of adverse consequences for not attending. Workers are also supposed to receive reasonable advance notice of the subject of any such meeting, and employers are prohibited from keeping attendance records of such meetings.

SEIU claimed the home care agencies have distributed misleading flyers to workers.

“It’s so frustrating to see home care agencies spending precious resources on a poisonous anti-union campaign instead of listening to workers who want a union,” said Regina Brown-Ross, a home care worker who voted in favor of union representation last year, in a statement.

Over the past year, more than 1,000 home care workers in Nevada have voted to join SEIU Local 1107, according to the union.

Brown-Ross added, “Home care agencies should be working with us, not against us, to achieve our shared goals of improving funding and building a solid workforce. Instead, some very bad apples are holding the entire industry back.”

Nevada already has a well-documented shortage of home care workers, and unless addressed the deficit is expected to worsen as the overall population ages and the demand for elder care services rises.

SEIU last year successfully lobbied lawmakers to establish a $16 minimum hourly wage for home care workers and increase the state’s Medicaid reimbursement rate for employers by 42%.

NLRB filings suggest that, in addition to A Helping Hand and Everyday Miracles, formal steps to organize workers have been taken at several other home care agencies in Las Vegas.