Opinion ID: 3210755
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Post-Election Acts of Alleged

Text: Retaliation At issue in this case is the Board’s conclusion that Napolitano, Claudio, Jacques, and Wells were discharged as retaliation for their unionization activities. Claudio, Jacques, and Napolitano were “the three leading union advocates.” (J.A. 32) They contacted the Union and worked with Walsh to organize the nurses at Somerset; they appeared in the Union brochure and YouTube video; and they served as the Union’s election observers. Wells also appeared in the YouTube video and in the brochure; she signed an 9 authorization card for the Union; and she spoke favorably about the Union at work. Those facts, paired with the conclusion that Somerset’s “animus toward the Union is beyond question,” led the ALJ to decide that the union activities of those women “were well known to” Somerset, which then targeted them for retaliation. (J.A. 32.) The first set of actions that formed the basis for the NLRB’s investigation of post-election events at the nursing home concerned Somerset’s enforcement of its attendance policy. Only 11 days after the election, Somerset issued two attendance warnings to Jacques, two to Claudio, and one to Napolitano, even though “[t]hey had not received written discipline prior to the election for the[ir] ... attendance records.” (J.A. 32.) The timing was troublesome – before the election, Somerset was lax with regard to attendance, but immediately after the election Konjoh took a personal interest in tardiness. Illis did not begin to focus on attendance until six weeks into her tenure as Administrator, after the election. Not only did the three nurses receive discipline for recent attendance issues, they were disciplined for lateness and absences dating back to nine months prior to the election. Before the election, only one employee had ever received formal discipline for attendance problems. The second set of Somerset’s actions at issue before the Board had to do with performance-based discipline. That discipline became significantly stricter immediately after the election. The ALJ concluded that [medicine and treatment] records were not scrutinized as carefully before the election as they were after the election, and ... any errors in 10 those records found prior to the election were rarely the subject of discipline. For example, [Somerset] offered in evidence numerous examples of discipline given to employees after the election for performance issues, but could only present three instances of discipline prior to the election. Even as to them, the maximum discipline issued was a written warning. (J.A. 33.) There were also suspicious circumstances, in the ALJ’s view, surrounding the dismissal of each of the four employees at issue. Claudio received her first warning ever on September 20 and her second on September 27. She received a two-day suspension on October 1, which was unusually severe compared to another nurse who committed the same infraction. Finally, she was discharged on October 21 for an infraction – completing medical chart entries after her shift rather than during it – which was a “not uncommon” practice according to Southgate’s testimony. (J.A. 34.) Jacques had worked at Somerset for 11 years. She was discharged for record-keeping errors that, prior to the election, “would have been remedied with in-service training” and for which “other nurses received less discipline.” (J.A. 34.) The sudden discharge came even as Somerset continued to put Jacques in the senior role of charge nurse, acknowledging her “experience and expertise.” (J.A. 7.) Moreover, Southgate testified that Konjoh told her that Somerset management was watching union organizers closely for infractions, and an employee who was a confidant of Illis’s testified that “Illis 11 told him to look for errors committed by Jacques in her charting.” (J.A. 34.) Napolitano was discharged two weeks after the election for improperly administering a zinc pill to a patient. She did improperly administer the pill, but Konjoh seemed intent on collecting evidence to support disciplinary action because she had instructed the patient to save any improperly administered pills rather than correct an error when discovered. Three other nurses made the same mistake and faced no discipline. A second reason cited for Napolitano’s dismissal was that she noted a patient’s pulse oxygen level at 0%, “an obvious error in documentation” that would have been “simply corrected” before the election. (J.A. 35.) Wells was a staffing coordinator at Somerset for five years before the election and had not previously been disciplined. She was on vacation during the election, and when she returned to work five days afterward, she was given a disciplinary warning for the first time. She had failed to reconcile discrepancies between manually typed schedules and entries in the computerized system for the prior weekend’s shifts. Somerset’s past practice would have allowed her to have the morning to correct the scheduling inconsistencies on her first day back. Instead, she was written up, and she received two more warnings the following week for mistakes in inputting employee schedules and a failure to provide Konjoh a written schedule. She was discharged on September 21, within three weeks of the election. The ALJ acknowledged that the scheduling errors and failure to properly use the electronic system were problematic, but he concluded that the sudden and rapid discipline following the 12 election suggested that the true motivation for Wells’s discharge was retaliation. The ALJ found two additional retaliatory acts against other employees. First, when union-supporter Tyler left Somerset, her records were marked with a notation that she was “not eligible for rehire – resigned with bad attitude toward company.” (J.A. 35.) She received this negative notation, even though before the election Illis had encouraged her to stay or take advantage of a tuition-assistance program. Separately, Somerset dropped several per diem employees within the two to three weeks following the election. To find replacements, Illis solicited a per diem nurse at another CareOne facility to come to Somerset and recommend other per diem employees who “would vote in [Somerset’s] favor in a new election” if the results of the first election were overturned. (J.A. 36.)