Nurse contends that union is discriminating against nonmember nurses and violating duty of fair representation

Baltimore, MD (April 16, 2025) – A nurse at Ascension Health’s St. Agnes Hospital has hit the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) union with federal charges, maintaining that union officials are discriminating against nonmembers as a vote on workplace issues approaches. The nurse, Jen Delaney, filed the unfair labor practice charge at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with free legal aid from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys.

The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law and adjudicating disputes between employers, union officials, and individual employees. Delaney details in her charges that NNOC union officials are forbidding nurses who are not formal union members, like herself, from voting on a “partial deal” that is part of a wider contract negotiation. The union is restricting the voting pool despite the fact that the union monopoly contract will impose conditions on all nurses at the facility, members and nonmembers alike.

Delaney is arguing that NNOC union officials are violating the “duty of fair representation,” a legal mandate that requires union officials not to discriminate in its bargaining functions, including on the basis of union membership. The duty originates from a 1944 Supreme Court case, Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railway Co., in which the Court recognized that rail union bosses were manipulating their powers over the workplace to discriminate against African-American railway workers.

Because Maryland lacks Right to Work protections for its private sector workers, NNOC union officials can impose working conditions on the nurses that require them to pay union dues or fees just to keep their jobs. In contrast, in Right to Work jurisdictions like nearby Virginia and West Virginia, union membership and all union financial support are the choice of each individual worker.

“NNOC union officials have been extremely abrasive to any nurse who isn’t gung-ho for the union’s agenda,” commented Delaney. “It wasn’t long ago that my coworkers and I backed an effort to try to vote this union out, and this new development shows exactly why. NNOC union bosses are freezing out nurses from the voting process who are unwilling to sign a membership form that states it is ‘voluntary,’ yet they require signatures to vote, even though that vote is going to have very significant consequences for all of us at St. Agnes.”

Federal Charges Follow Nurses’ Attempt to Vote Union Out

Delaney led an effort to “decertify” (or remove) the NNOC union earlier this year. Delaney and her coworkers reported that union officials made taking care of patients more difficult and that the union generally served as a divisive force in the workplace.

“NNOC union officials are clearly not interested in ‘representing’ all nurses at St. Agnes, and have instead actively discriminated against nurses who are critical of the union’s priorities and who have exercised their legally-protected right to reject formal union membership,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “While this is a violation of the duty of fair representation, it exposes a more fundamental problem with federal labor law: Union officials shouldn’t have the power to foist their ‘representation’ on workers who have disaffiliated with the union to begin with, and certainly shouldn’t have the ability to force those same dissenting workers to subsidize a union they don’t want and never asked for.”

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.