Hospitals have tried to coerce employee speech. We can stop it.
Glen Maloney is an engineering mechanic and chief steward of Manchester Memorial Hospital Service and Skilled Maintenance Employees United, which represents support staff at multiple Eastern Connecticut Health Network (ECHN) facilities.
He helped workers at Rockville General Hospital form their union, concerned that many of his co-workers under the ECHN umbrella lacked any mechanism to improve their working conditions, pay and benefits. Listen to him describe the obstacles they faced, including being required to attend captive audience meetings.
In Connecticut, we have an opportunity to protect workers who seek to form a union from coercive captive audience meetings.
Senate Bill 163 will give a worker the right – when the subject of a meeting is about the employer’s position on politics (including union organizing) or religion – to stop listening and return to work without fear of being disciplined or terminated.