Registered nurses at the George Washington University Hospital are working to form a union, with the D.C. Nurses Association as its bargaining representative, according to DCNA executive director Edward Smith.

“We are driven by a desire to provide the safest, most compassionate and most patient-centered care possible,” organizers said in a statement. “Unfortunately, repeated attempts to work personally and directly with hospital leadership have failed to yield lasting systemic improvements.”

Smith said the nurses are announcing the unionizing effort publicly after DCNA heard over the weekend that management had discovered the campaign.

“We’ve heard reports from our nurses that a number of managers are trying to determine who’s leading the campaign and trying to squash it as quickly as they can,” he said. “[It’s] not a surprise that management is coming in to try to stop the organizing efforts and not a surprise that they’re now saying, ‘We want to help you, we want to have things go better.’”

Per Smith, there are about 750 registered nurses at the George Washington University Hospital, which is owned by Universal Health Services. The possible new union would represent those nurses, he said, but not nurses who work at George Washington Medical Faculty Associates, which is a separate employer.

The acute care hospital has nearly 400 beds, and includes a trauma care center and a neonatal intensive care unit. In 2021, hospital staff handled nearly 18,500 inpatient admissions and almost 47,000 emergency room visits.

Smith said the organizing work at the hospital is going well so far, but there is no timeline yet for the nurses to call for a union election.

And he sees plenty of potential roadblocks ahead from the George Washington University Hospital management, which historically has resisted working with unions. A group of other hospital workers are already represented by 1199SEIU, another union. In 2019, the hospital attempted to decertify the union and withheld a pay increase after years of slow-walking contract negotiations, which led to a National Labor Relations Board complaint.

The George Washington University Hospital spokesperson Beth Couch said the hospital welcomed the opportunity to “provide information and engage in substantive discussions” about unionization.

“We recognize that our nurses have a federally protected right to either support or oppose unionization,” Couch said in an emailed statement. “However, we strongly believe that remaining union free – keeping the direct relationship between our nurses and the Hospital and all the flexibility and individual empowerment that it provides – is the key to both our nurses’ ability to thrive in their professional practice and our continuing successful partnership with them in providing the best possible care to our patients and our community.”

The hospital declined to comment specifically on allegations that management was seeking to identify union organizers or stall their efforts.

The George Washington University nurses said patient care and staff retention issues were the main reasons behind their decision to unionize. Smith added equipment and safety problems to that list, and also pointed to a feeling of being ignored by hospital leadership as a precipitating issue that prompted nurses to begin organizing.

“Ultimately what ends up happening when your requests fall on deaf ears, you feel that you’re not getting the respect that, quite frankly, these nurses have earned,” he said.

Smith said the nurses’ unionizing effort at the hospital is one of the largest in recent memory.

“We have not organized such a large facility since probably the nineties at Children’s [National] Hospital,” he said. “Obviously a campaign of this significance I think will reverberate beyond the bounds of D.C.”

Nurses at most D.C. hospitals, including Howard University Hospital, Children’s National Hospital, United Medical Center, and MedStar Washington Hospital Center, are already unionized. DCNA represents about 2,000 nurses already, in hospitals and in local public schools and public charter schools.

George Washington University Hospital, Universal Health Services, and the university’s Medical Faculty Associates will operate and staff the new hospital at St. Elizabeths, which will replace the beleaguered United Medical Center. Smith said DCNA had pushed for the deal to include a provision for a unionized workforce from the beginning, but was rebuffed. He said the union would seek to organize workers in the new facility when it opens.

Nurses across the D.C. region have been working through a nationwide shortage of nurses as well as the emotional exhaustion and trauma of the pandemic. A 2022 survey from the DCNA found that 95% of respondents thought that staff shortages were a major issue in their workplace. 80% said they usually work at least one shift per week with inadequate staffing. The result, nurses say, is a medical system that struggles to deal with surges in illness.

Throughout the pandemic, local health care workers have consistently spoken out about dangerous working conditions, staffing shortages, and the exhaustion, stress and grief that have come with years of pandemic service.

Those problems have led to an increase in union activity among local nurses and other medical staff. Last year, Howard University nurses — also represented by DCNA — went on strike as contract negotiations with employer Adventist Healthcare dragged on. Later in the year, resident doctors at Children’s National demonstrated for a new contract with inflation-adjusted pay, paid sick leave, and limits on the number of patients they’re expected to care for at once, among other demands.

At the George Washington University Hospital, the nurses were inspired in their push for collective bargaining by recent union wins in New York City, Minnesota and California, plus a country-wide nurses strike in the United Kingdom.

“These nurses are not interested in beating up management,” Smith said. “They’re interested in working with management to create a better environment and create a better care environment for patients.”