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Clinic workers celebrate limit on mandatory union-busting meetings
Community Clinic workers are celebrating this week after the California State Assembly approved a new bill that bans employers from coercing workers to attend political and religious meetings, including mandatory ‘captive audience’ anti-union meetings.
The bill, known as SB 399 (Wahab), comes just as clinic workers across California report having faced retaliation from employers trying to stop them from forming their union with SEIU Community Clinic Workers United.
The bill, authored by Sen. Aisha Wahab would protect workers from retaliation when they decline to attend or participate in meetings designed to impose employers’ political or religious views on workers.
Maabel Quevedo, formerly a Medical Assistant and Psychiatric Telehealth Technician, shared how management at Innercare, a community clinic in the Imperial Valley, reassigned her from her clinic in Calexico to another one in El Centro, Calif., after she declined to attend a “captive audience” anti-union meeting.
“I work in psychiatry, where patients call in for urgent needs. Some of them are in crisis, and we need to be there so they can talk to someone. The choice between being available to my patients or going to a meeting where I’m going to be pressured against joining a union was pretty clear to me,” said Quevado.
Shortly after the meeting Quevedo says she was transferred “away from the patients that I’ve spent so much time building trust with and getting to know. Innercare also stopped mileage reimbursement for me, which I’d received before I refused to go to the anti-union meeting.”
The recent experiences of community clinic workers who’ve been subjected to anti-union indoctrination meetings by union-busting ‘management consultants’ are a prime example of why SB 399 is urgently needed,”
SB 399 is an important step towards protecting California workers from coercion in the workplace.
SB 399 now heads to the Senate to concur amendments and then to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.