For those of you who haven’t heard, we’re lending support to employees at our sister location in Marlborough who wish to join SHARE. Impressed by what we’ve accomplished, they’ve come to us with a request to join in. If you have friends at UMass Memorial’s Marlborough Hospital, we could use your help connecting them with our union.
A Rising Tide
SHARE believes that everyone benefits when workers have a say. We’re making work better for ourselves, and we want our colleagues up the road to have that opportunity, too. What’s good for Marlborough Hospital is good for UMass Memorial, and for the Central Massachusetts community.
SHARE is a union unique to UMass Memorial and UMass Medical School, tailored to our needs here. Our region is distinct, with its own economic challenges. We know that inequality is hurting us. Without unions to advocate for middle-class wages, employers alone dictate the market rate.
Our connections make us strong, and we want to strengthen and be strengthened by the inclusion of the hospital’s Marlborough location, to enlist the help of our colleagues toward improving the area where we live and work.
Everyone Should Be Free to Participate
We’ve been cultivating our own organization for twenty years at UMass Memorial. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about negotiating, and about the need to deepen our understanding of how to run a hospital . . . how to run *our* hospital.
Those of us who have been here since our union’s beginnings will tell you that our hospital is a very different place now from what it was then. We don’t suggest that those ambitions are easily achieved: we all have important day jobs, and having a union doesn’t make the day-to-day go away. We’re still working hard to make our hospital the kind of place we want it to be.
But we want our friends in Marlborough to know that our SHARE union gives us opportunities to compare notes, to talk and think together, to build structures for making improvements. Like our hospital’s senior administration, we believe in the mission of our hospital. We also believe that a labor-management partnership can make our hospital vibrant and resilient. We can’t do it without each other. We believe that the same is true in Marlborough.
We Want to Share Values and Strength
There are 2700 of us (plus our 500 friends in SHARE at UMass Medical School), and our relationships with our employer are extremely complex. As a matter of principle, we maintain kind and respectful conversations with those in management roles. We have support and assistance from in-house SHARE staff organizers who help this happen. Perhaps most importantly, we can have those conversations safely because our union affords us an independent source of power. Our friends at Marlborough need this, too. They deserve to negotiate their own agreements with their hospital leaders.
Let’s Connect
If you have friends at Marlborough Hospital, please let them know about your experience as a SHARE member. They may want to know about raises and benefits, but they may also want to know what we’re trying to do to improve the culture in our hospital, how we’re able to participate in more decisions, and how we work to improve the quality of care for patients.
If you can help connect SHARE Organizers with friends who work at Marlborough Hospital, let us know. If you can help us make an introduction, or would like to know more about what we’re doing, please call the SHARE office (508-929-4020) and leave a message on the voicemail for one of the Marlborough SHARE Organizers to call you back.
