In this monthly roundup of “large-unit labor elections,” Benjamin Y. Fong from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University recaps all National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections of 250 or more voters tallied in the previous month, in this case for April 2025. See the March 2025 roundup here.
It’s the center’s belief that if the labor movement in the United States is to be rebuilt, it is going to be through experimentation with new strategies and tactics that push against the constraints of labor law and through large-unit organizing in the hundreds and thousands. The latter concern will be at issue in this series.
Given the outsize importance of large-unit labor elections in the overall composition of the labor movement, there’s a good argument to be made that the overall trajectory of organized labor can be gleaned from an analysis of such elections.
On April 30, 404 workers at the Sharp Coronado Hospital in Coronado, California, voted to join the Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), the largest NLRB representation election win of the month of April. For SEIU-UHW, this victory represented another milestone: the organization of the last acute care facility in the Sharp system.
SEIU-UHW has rattled off a slew of large-unit victories in this system, beginning with victories for 1,600 workers at the Sharp Grossmont Hospital and Sharp HospiceCare in 2023. In April 2024, they won certification for 1,100 workers at the Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, and in July 2024, they did the same for 2,000 workers at the Sharp Metropolitan Campus. Together these victories have added more than 5,500 members to SEIU-UHW’s rolls. (Full…
Auteur: Benjamin Y. Fong
