At Rhode Island Hospital, nurses and other health professionals can take on-site courses to earn training credits required for licensure. Support staff can learn English as a second language, math and computing at the Foundation Skills Center, or they can pursue a GED.
It’s all part of a collaboration between the hospital and the unions who represent the majority of its 6,000 workers, the Teamsters and the United Nurses and Allied Health Professionals.
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Now they’re moving toward the next level, developing a “career ladder” system to help lower-ranked workers – in housekeeping, food service, laundry – advance into professional jobs.
This is what “progressive” labor-management partnerships look like, said Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, executive director of the R.I. Economic Policy Council, which is supporting an application by the hospital and unions for United Way funding for the project.
“I think in industries that are unionized – and health care is pretty unionized – it really makes sense to partner with the unions to train workers,” Bergstrom said. And like the Rhode Island Hospital initiative, he said, the best efforts take unions well beyond their traditional role in job training and into adult education, skills development, and job ladders.
Health care is particularly well-suited to this approach, he said, “because they have such a long job ladder: everything from orderlies to surgeons, and every rung in between.”
Unions have a long history of being involved in work force training. Matthew M. Bodah, of the Labor Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, said organized labor has been running such programs since the 19th century.
The most successful programs in this tradition, Bodah said, are the apprenticeship systems in the building trades and in printing. As their industries have changed, unions have also stepped up their efforts to help existing members adjust. Laborers who used to primarily dig trenches, for example, have gotten union-sponsored training in hazardous waste removal and brownfields remediation, opening up new job opportunities, he said.
Unions also invest in education to remain competitive, especially because union labor tends to cost more, Bodah said. “If you can offer employers a more productive worker, then you can justify the fact that total compensation is higher,” he said.
John Shalvey, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 99, said that’s why his union focuses heavily on education: “Our training keeps us employed, and it is our best asset.”
Louis Soares, who runs small-business services at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation but is also involved in work force development, said the building trades have been facing a “particular challenge” because there’s a shortage of people going into those trades. As a result, they’re being more aggressive about recruiting, reaching out to community groups and building partnerships to get more young people into their apprenticeship programs.
(The Laborers union took it one step further, creating its own charter school.)
“I think they can actually reinvent the apprenticeship model with what they’re doing,” Soares said. But the best examples of innovation, he added, look to the service-sector unions.
“What’s happening is, as we have moved to a knowledge and innovation economy, we’ve also had an increase in service-sector jobs,” Soares said. The result has been more labor-management collaboration, he said, because “it’s harder for unions to advocate for their membership if their members simply don’t have the skills, and companies can’t compete if they can’t find skilled labor.”
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation’s largest health care union, has done this particularly well in New York, both Soares and Bergstrom said.
Three decades ago, SEIU Local 1199 negotiated with the Hospital League of New York to create the Employment, Training and Job Security Program, now one of the largest health care training institutions in the nation, with a focus on “career ladder” advancement.
“The SEIU’s approach is more about being a partner to workers and employers to provide the workplace environment and skills they need to be successful,” Soares said. Unions across the country are redefining their roles, he added, and “one of the most effective ways to redefine it” is with approaches like SEIU’s, “because that meets the needs of both employers and unions.”
The changes aren’t just happening at individual work sites, either, both Soares and Bergstrom said. Some unions are taking on new bigger roles in promoting large-scale improvements in adult education and skills development.
As with apprenticeships and on-the-job training, the unions aren’t starting from scratch. The union-backed Institute for Labor Studies & Research, for example, has long been a provider of work force literacy and training programs, serving more than 50,000 Rhode Islanders since its creation in 1980.
But now, as a board member of the Economic Policy Council, George Nee, secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, has become a “champion” for adult education, Bergstrom said. Soares said he sees what could be a very good trend, if unions embrace it for the long run.
“They’re reshaping a vision for themselves,” Soares said.
