The first week in September is National Blood Donation Week, but employees at Bloodworks Northwest’s Olympia Donor Center won’t be celebrating. They’ll be demonstrating against unfair labor practices and management’s response to their recent vote to unionize.
Workplace challenges
Before the pandemic, when you went to a Bloodworks donor center to give blood, you would have been greeted by a volunteer who would check you in. A blood collection specialist would then check your vitals before drawing your blood or platelets. Afterwards, a second volunteer would sit with you for fifteen minutes to make sure you were okay, and schedule you for your next donation appointment.
By 2023, both volunteer positions had been eliminated, leaving the medical staff to fill all those roles. This change was first made at the start of the pandemic, to limit the spread of the disease. But even after COVID precautions were lifted, Bloodworks management did not bring the volunteers back; instead, they forced workers to take on the volunteers’ tasks without any additional compensation. As the pandemic ebbed, the medical staff felt more and more overworked, but when workers raised their concerns, Bloodworks wouldn’t budge. Managers cited concerns about training new volunteers on the company’s software and regulations—issues which had never stopped them from onboarding volunteers before the pandemic. Bloodworks Northwest, in a request for comment, indicated that “volunteer roles have returned,” but the only current volunteer role that Works in Progress is aware of involves re-stocking snacks for donors.
The final straw came when a donor threatened to harm an employee. On February 4th, 2023, a donor told a staff member who was preparing to draw their blood, “If you miss [my vein], I’ll shoot you.” The employee brought this issue to their supervisor and asked that the donor be “deferred,” or barred from donating in the future. The manager dismissed the concern as “dramatic,” and the donor was scheduled for two more appointments in March and April. At this point, the Olympia staff escalated their concern to upper management, submitting a petition formally asking for the donor to be deferred. While management did ultimately comply, the staff were told that the the petition approach was inappropriate, and that future concerns should be brought directly to their supervisor – the same supervisor who first dismissed the concern.
With these concerns in mind, the staff in Olympia began a campaign to unionize. Two weeks after the petition and management’s lackluster response, a majority of Olympia employees submitted their Union-Authorization cards, the first step in unionizing their workplace. They then scheduled a June vote to join the Teamsters Union, as members of Local 252. It was at this point that management began to take notice.
Bloodworks Pushes Back
At some point in early June, Bloodworks corporate offices hired the law firm of Davis Grimm Payne & Marra, a Seattle-based law office focusing on Labor Law. According to their website, Davis Grimm Payne & Marra help “clients fight off union organizing campaigns,” and can help maximize a client’s “chances to defeat an organizing effort.” Before the June 27th vote, staff at the Olympia location were subjected to a barrage of meetings and memos full of implicit threats that employees would lose benefits and pay if they unionized and pleas for them to vote “no.”
The Teamsters representative was ready for these tactics. Before the final ‘captive audience’ meeting with Bloodworks prior to the vote, the union rep passed out bingo cards to all the employees. The squares contained predictable anti-union talking points like, “A union may force you to go on strike” and “We can’t afford to pay more.” During the meeting, the Bloodworks supervisor sat down and read from a prepared script, and the employees marked off more and more squares until someone excitedly called out a “bingo!”
When the vote was tallied, the results were definitive: on June 27th, 2023, by a margin of 12 to 3, the employees of the Olympia branch of Bloodworks had agreed to unionize. They had joined Teamsters Local 252.
More challenges ahead
Unfortunately, their troubles with management were just beginning. The final step to formally join the union was to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement between Bloodworks Northwest and the staff as represented by Teamsters. Bloodworks Northwest commented that they are “negotiat[ing] in good faith, and … hope to reach an agreement soon.” Fourteen months after the vote, and eleven rounds of bargaining later, the parties have yet to come to an agreement. Dragging out negotiations is a common tactic used by employers to undermine a newly-formed union.
Without the benefits that a union contract would provide, Olympia staff remain vulnerable to retaliation. While Bloodworks employees typically receive cost-of-living raises every year, that didn’t happen last year for staff involved in the union drive. Employees can generally request transfers to different clinics, but all recent requests from Olympia have been denied. Four employees who participated in the union vote have since been fired.
To bring awareness to their struggle, the unionized employees of Bloodwork’s Olympia Donor Center will be picketing during Blood Donation Week, the first week in September. Getting public support is especially important right now, as the staff at the sister Bloodworks Donor Center in Silverdale are holding their own union vote on September 6th, while facing the same anti-union pressures from the management.
The Loss of a Community
The decision to end volunteer positions and the current atmosphere at the Olympia donor center have fundamentally changed the experience of donating with Bloodworks. “It was like a family… that was my community,” recalls Linda Lutz, who has been donating blood since the ’90s and who been volunteering for 15 years prior to the pandemic. With the high staff turnover—more than half of the staff employed during the union vote have since left—it seems to Linda that “every time I go in, I see fewer familiar faces. I no longer go in to see my friends and donate blood, I just go in to donate blood.”
How to Demonstrate Support:
Besides joining the union workers on the picket line, you can support them in a few other ways:
If you currently donate blood at Bloodworks, you can choose to instead donate to the American Red Cross, which regularly operates blood drives in Olympia. Blood banks routinely sell blood to each other, and choosing to donate with a different bank will not lead to any local shortage of blood. You can find the American Red Cross’s local donation schedule at https://www.redcross.org/local/washington/about-us/locations/south-puget-sound-and-olympics.html.
If you donate platelets, there is no local alternative to Bloodworks, and the staff encourages you to continue to donate with them even during the picketing. The nearest alternative platelet donation center is with the American Red Cross in Vancouver: https://www.redcrossblood.org/local-homepage/location/am-red-cross-fixed-site-vancouver.html.
Finally, you can reach out to Bloodworks directly and express your support for the union and a successful union contract. You can contact Bloodworks Northwest at 206-292-6500, and ask to speak to the CEO Curt Bailey. Let him know that you support the Olympia Union, and encourage him to finalize a collective bargaining agreement without delay.
Also in this issue: Opinion – Bloodworks Puts the Squeeze on Donors, Employees
Nicholas Kohnen is a Volunteer with Works in Progress
A great book about organizing workers is No Shortcuts – organizing for power in the new gilded age by Jane McAlevey. She talks about worker dominated unions that are willing to strike as opposed to managed unions which negotiate with management to the detriment of the workers, like SEIU’s Local 775 of nursing home workers in WA. The unions where workers run the show do much better than those that allow the union leaders advocate and negotiate with little worker input.