Covid-Weary Nursing Home Workers Turn to Organizing, Activism

Nursing homes face increased activism and union organizing efforts among nursing assistants and support staffers whose low pay, poor benefits, and now-dangerous working conditions have been widely scrutinized during the Covid-19 crisis.

For decades, nursing homes have largely rebuffed efforts to represent nurses and other workers in their facilities by the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the United Steelworkers and others.

But the industry is “riper for unionization than it’s ever been before,” said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

That’s due, mainly, to increased organizing efforts by the Service ...