reported the nonprofit paid its chief executive $13 million the prior year, had $41 billion in an investment arm, and maintained $18 billion in cash reserves—all after openly pursuing reductions in hospital staffing and lobbying against state-level bills mandating safer nurse-to-patient ratios. Being squeezed by such a profitable nonprofit motivated the Austin nurses to organize.
In the six months following the Seton vote, nurses at two Ascension hospitals in Wichita, Kansas, also unionized—part of what labor scholars call an ongoing trend. In Texas, where just 5 percent of workers are unionized, the Austin election was a blue-moon event. The Seton union was the second-largest union of any kind to form in Texas via a National Labor Relations Board election in the last 16 years.