The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, who blogs at Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
Corewell Health CEO Tina Freese Decker, who fashions herself as an “authentic” leader but is anything but, boasted on a little watched podcast that her leadership is predicated on being “effective and engaged, especially as a listener.”
Tina Freese Decker
If listening is Decker’s strong suit, she’d be wise to make an emergency appointment with a Corewell audiologist because she apparently didn’t hear the deafening union drumbeats of Metro Detroit Corewell nurses who are mad as hell and aren’t prepared to suffer their working conditions anymore.
The Teamsters on Friday petitioned the NLRB to organize more than 9,600 nurses working at Corewell East, a once nationally respected healthcare network formerly known as Beaumont Health. During the seven years of leadership under former CEO John Fox, Beaumont’s patient care precipitously declined because of aggressive cost cutting and layoffs, while Fox pocketed some $50 million in compensation.
$4 Billion Reserve
Fox handed the keys to Beaumont, the biggest hospital system in southeastern Michigan, to Decker in February 2022 when she was CEO of Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health. Decker subsequently merged the two hospital systems, rebranding the combined operations as Corewell Health. Although Beaumont supposedly had a $4 billion reserve, the only takeover cost for Decker was paying Fox at least $10 million to return to his native Atlanta, where he was featured on the Magnolia network tending to his chickens and doing other chores on his makeshift residential farm.
Although I never imagined it possible, nurses for Corewell East tell me that patient care has declined further under Decker’s leadership, at times dangerously so because of severe staff shortages. Whereas working at Beaumont was once very prestigious and often required insider connections to get hired as a nurse, these days pretty much anyone with a nursing degree can get hired, regardless of the level of experience or the quality of their training.
The situation has become so dire that the Teamsters opted to organize Corewell’s entire eastern Michigan nursing workforce, rather than target individual hospitals as would typically be the strategy.
Teamsters officials believe the Corewell East union drive is the biggest in Michigan in more than a half century.
The Teamsters were only required to amass signed cards from 30%, or 2,885 Corewell nurses, endorsing a union certification vote to file their NLRB petition. Sources say the Teamsters gathered considerably more signatures. Union officials say there are just getting started, and plan ambitious union drives at other Michigan hospitals in response to declining work conditions that’s causing nurses to abandon their profession in droves, resulting in chronic nurse shortages like those plaguing Corewell.
Katherine Wallace
According to Katherine Wallace, a wicked smart post anesthesia care nurse at Corewell Troy and one of the leaders in the unionization drive, there are more than 50,000 registered nurses in Michigan who no longer work in nursing.
Dave Hughes, the Teamsters official overseeing the Corewell East organizing drive, told me he’s already been contacted by nurses from Corewell West, which comprises Decker’s former Spectrum hospitals in Grand Rapids and western Michigan, as well as nurses working at Henry Ford, Ascension, and McLaren.
“The Corewell East effort is the start of something fresh and will balloon into something huge from a healthcare standpoint for the Teamsters in Michigan,” said Hughes, who previously worked as a paramedic.
David Hughes
Sources said Corewell East managers were called into emergency meetings immediately after the Teamsters filed its NLRB petition, indicating Decker and her senior management team mistakenly believed that the union busting firm they hired had sufficiently derailed the Teamsters’ organizing efforts. Corewell promptly sent a clueless message to its nurses saying the Teamsters’ petition is “legally invalid just as the Teamsters’ previous filings have been.”
Not a message I’d expect from Decker, who previously stated that she was inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was a die-hard union supporter who would have proudly stood in solidarity with Corewell East’s union organizing nurses. Indeed, MLK was assassinated in 1968 while visiting Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike.
Pushback Expected
Hughes, the Teamsters leader, said in a text message that management pushback was expected, and that Corewell is disputing the union’s right to organize charge nurses who have administrative duties and contingent nurses who work on a per diem basis.
“We’ve prepared for (Corewell’s) frivolous arguments,” Hughes said, which he argued would ultimately work in the Teamsters’ favor.
“The nurses aren’t dumb and can see the company doesn’t want this to happen,” Hughes said.
Corewell “spokesman” Mark Geary, who has never once spoken to me in the more than three years I’ve been writing about his company, ignored a request for comment, as did Darryl Elmouchi, Corewell’s chief operating officer. Elmouchi led Corewell East on an interim basis after Benjamin Schwartz, a hotshot physician and Harvard educated hospital administrator Corewell lured from New York to run the former Beaumont hospitals, left after only 13 months on the job.
Schwartz likely received a substantial severance, rumored to be as high as $20 million. Tongue-tied Geary previously ignored requests for comment on Schwartz’s bye-bye package, as well as confirming that the $10 million golden parachute paid to Fox was the only payment he will be receiving. Substantial executive severance payments are sometimes paid over a period of years.
Geary is a notorious spinmeister, but the amount of lipstick he’d require to provide even a remotely credible argument for Corewell’s union opposition would be an environmental hazard. There’s a growing body of evidence documenting that when nurse/patient ratios decline, which happens at unionized hospitals, patient care improves and lives are saved.
Michigan Medicine's Union
Michigan Medicine, a University of Michigan teaching hospital and ranked among the best hospitals in the country, is unionized and its nursing labor relations puts Corewell’s to shame.
In 2022, when hospitals like Beaumont were paying top dollar for temporary nurses to keep their doors open, Michigan Medicine agreed to a lucrative four-year, $273 million contract that included a 22.5% raise over the course of the agreement, a $5,000 bonus for each nurse, elimination of mandatory overtime, and expanded staffing guidelines.
Michigan Medicine also disclosed that it had implemented an “aggressive” nurse recruitment program that had reduced its nurse vacancy rate to 5%, compared with a national average of 17%.
Rather than assuage the staffing ratio concerns of Corwell East’s nurses, Decker and her management team are looking to further bolster hospital profits at their expense.
As an example, Brad Lukas, the chief nursing office at Corewell’s Troy hospital, historically the highest performing and best managed hospital in the former Beaumont network, aims to shave more than $3 million in nursing costs this year. Troy’s ER is among the busiest in Michigan, and waits can extend for hours.
Corewell Troy is overseen by President Nancy Susick, a nurse who previously oversaw Beaumont’s flagship Royal Oak hospital and fired the hospital’s highly regarded head of pediatrics after he challenged budget cuts. Susick escorted the beloved pediatrician from the hospital in front of his horrified staff.
Susick and spokesman Geary are holdovers from the Fox regime, which speaks volumes about Decker.
Union Credibility With Nurses
The Teamsters have considerable credibility with Corewell’s nurses because the union already represents the tough-as-nails nurse anesthetists servicing most of the Corewell East hospitals. Carolyn Wilson, a nurse who was formerly Beaumont’s chief operating officer, years ago threw the nurse anesthetists under the bus and outsourced them to a Texas-based company called NorthStar Anesthesia. The nurse anesthetists immediately moved to form their own union, and later joined the Teamsters.
Staffing and patient care issues also fueled the nurse anesthetists’ union drive, which the Teamsters addressed in contract talks without calling a strike. NorthStar’s nurse anesthetists speak highly of the Teamsters and are encouraging Corewell’s nurses to join.
“Working in post anesthesia care I regularly interact with the Teamsters’ nurse anesthetists,” said Wallace, the union organizer. “They are well paid and very satisfied with the Teamsters’ representation.”
Significantly reduced healthcare benefits have also angered Corewell East’s nurses. Corewell moved the nurses’ healthcare plan to Priority Health, which Corewell owns, and the nurses say is reaping increased profits at their expense. As an example, the maximum out of pocket costs for a single person is $9,100 and for a family $18,200. The maximum out of pocket for a single person was previously $3,250 and for a family was $6,200.
Priority’s plan also significantly increased deductibles.
Decker's Reputation at Stake
Decker, Corewell’s CEO, has her industry reputation at stake keeping the Teamsters out of her hospitals. She appears quite ambitious and was voted to chair the American Hospital Association in 2025. The AHA is an organization that promotes the interests of hospital CEOs and vigorously opposes patient protection measures such as mandatory staffing levels and price transparency.
Decker, who received $4.4 million in 2022 compensation, won’t have any credibility among America’s hospital CEOs if her Beaumont takeover results in the Teamsters unionizing all Corewell’s hospitals, as well as other Michigan healthcare facilities. Beaumont had serious labor discontent when Decker took over the hospital system, but she either ignored the issue, was negligent in her due diligence, or mistakenly believed Corewell nurses would fall for her phony claims about wanting to build a world-class healthcare company.
A contentious labor dispute could awaken the Detroit media to the egregious lie Decker and Fox told Detroit area residents when they concocted their sweetheart deal that enriched them at the expense of the southeastern Michigan residents. When Spectrum announced its takeover of Beaumont, it promised to maintain dual headquarters for the hospital systems.
Corewell’s top management is based entirely in Grand Rapids. At the time of the merger, Fox said Beaumont had amassed a $4 billion reserve. Fox also disclosed that Corewell was committed to spending “significant dollars” to embark on a three to five-year plan to expand the health system’s private bed capacity.
Corewell has announced some ambitious expansion plans in western Michigan but has made no mention of any significant investments in the Detroit area, except updating the dilapidated elevators at its flagship Royal Oak hospital. Spokesman Geary has ignored my inquiries about the status of Corewell’s promised Detroit area investments, and whether Beaumont’s $4 billion reserve was being used to finance Corewell’s investments in western Michigan.
Michigan is a battleground state in the upcoming election, and both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris profess a love for unions. If that commitment is indeed sincere, I expect an imminent announcement from the Harris campaign publicly expressing support for the union drive of Corewell East’s nurses and admonishing Decker and her managers not to interfere with the Teamsters’ organizing efforts.
According to Open Secrets, individuals associated with Corewell have so far contributed $47,593 to Harris’ campaign and $8,351 to Donald Trump’s campaign.
So far, Michigan’s senior Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Rep. Debbie Dingell, and Oakland County Commission Chair David Woodward are the only state elected officials to show public support for Corewell East’s organizing nurses.
Trump also has an opportunity to make political hay from the Corewell East nursing union drive. Biden’s ineffective FTC chair Lina Khan could have blocked Spectrum’s takeover of Beaumont but opted not to do so, despite Biden calling on her to “vigorously” enforce antitrust laws and recognize that the law allowed her “to challenge prior bad mergers that past Administrations did not previously challenge.”
Spectrum’s takeover of Beaumont was rubber stamped by Michigan attorney general “Do Nothing Dana” Nessel, who also blessed Henry Ford’s takeover of eight Michigan Ascension hospitals without any scrutiny, conditions, or public comment. Even the Detroit Free Press remains in the dark about some of the details.
Regarding healthcare, Democrats and Republicans have badly failed Michiganders. Tina Freese Decker is the poster child for the disastrous consequences.
Reach the writer at eric@starkmanapproved.com. Confidentiality is assured.
