The State Supreme Court on Friday unanimously rejected UW nurses’ bid to recreate the union they lost in 2014, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
The union ended as a result of former Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, which largely banned collective bargaining for most public employees.
UW Health refused to recognize the union when nurses revived it in 2019. Administrators asserted that Act 10 prohibited the hospital from engaging in collective bargaining.
The latest ruling upholds prior decisions by a Dane County Circuit Court judge and the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC). The latter in 2022 said that UW Health was not required to recognize the union because, in addition to limiting public sector bargaining, Act 10 stripped references to UW Hospital from the 1939 Wisconsin Employment Peace Act, which governs unions for private sector employees.
SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin appealed that ruling because it did not say whether UW Health could still voluntarily recognize the union. SEIU also argued that the Peace Act still applies to the hospital and its workers — a view consistent with an opinion authored in 2022 by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul.
Friday’s ruling determined, however, that SEIU’s augment “is simply mistaken and inconsistent with decades of statutory interpretation cases from this court.”
