Union Busters Coming After Me: The Fred Hutch Website Saga
A Fred Hutch employee describes how management hired an anti-union law firm and created a website to intimidate staff after a unionization campaign began. The piece details tactics like captive-audience meetings and targeting of pro-union workers to discourage organizing.
Background
- Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center ("Fred Hutch") is a major Seattle-based cancer research and treatment institution, affiliated with the University of Washington.
- The article is written by a union organizer at Fred Hutch who alleges the institution hired anti-union consultants (often called "union busters") to counter a staff unionization effort.
- The controversy centers on a Fred Hutch-hosted website that the author claims was secretly created and run by management's hired consultants to surveil and smear pro-union employees, rather than being an independent whistleblower site.
- The dispute is part of a broader national trend of health-care and research workers unionizing (often with the UAW or similar unions), and of employers pushing back via labor-law firms and "union avoidance" strategies during union elections.