This report was updated at 1:35 p.m. 4/23/2026.

Employees of two Wisconsin clinics operated by Rogers Behavioral Health voted by large majorities in favor of union representation Wednesday after more than two months in which the mental health nonprofit had campaigned heavily against the union.

In West Allis, employees voted 53-4 in favor of joining the National Union of Healthcare Workers. In Madison, the vote to join the union was 26-4. The votes were supervised by National Labor Relations Board officials at both clinics.

Employees at the two clinics “are ready to negotiate contracts that would provide better pay, protections to ensure safe staffing levels and more time to care for individual patients, as Rogers workers secured in California after joining NUHW,” the union stated in a press release Thursday.

The union represents Rogers employees at three facilities in California, where contracts have been negotiated, and one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where contract negotiations are underway. “While contract negotiations are still ongoing in Philadelphia, the contracts Rogers agreed to for workers based in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego are among the best in the industry,”  the union statement said. “They include strong raises, limits on caseloads, and guarantees that no jobs will be lost to new technologies, including artificial intelligence.”

Rogers, based in Oconomowoc, said in a statement released Thursday, “We acknowledge the union election outcomes in Madison and West Allis Lincoln Center. We are evaluating our next steps in support of our system of care. We are committed to our patients, our people, and the integrated care that has made Rogers a trusted provider across Wisconsin since 1907.”

The union said in its press release that during the West Allis election Wednesday, Rogers management “prohibited NUHW’s representative from entering the facility and then suspended a worker who had agreed to serve as the union’s observer.”

Federal labor law procedures call for representatives from management as well as the union to observe the vote count. The absence of a union observer “could have resulted in the ballots being impounded and not immediately counted,” the union press release stated.

A second Rogers employee volunteered to serve as the union observer for the count “over the objections of Rogers’ representatives,” the NUHW stated, adding that Rogers did not attempt to stop ballots from being counted at the Madison clinic.

The workers involved were among three employees fired shortly after workers announced their petition for a union. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges over the terminations, claiming that the three were fired in retaliation for their support for unionization, which is illegal under federal law.

Rogers has declined to explain the firings, citing employment confidentiality, but said that it has not violated any laws.

Rogers Behavioral Health issued a follow-up statement Thursday about the voting conflict in West Allis. According to the statement, “individuals who are no longer employeed by Rogers had illegally entered the facility,” and Rogers contacted local police.

The next step will be for the National Labor Relations Board to certify the results. But a federal lawsuit challenging the agency is still pending. In addition, Rogers said in public statements as well as in communications to the workers before the vote that the company would not begin bargaining with the union until all its appeals have been exhausted. 

The nonprofit campaigned actively against unionization, telling employees that a union would not have been in the interests of the staff, the patients or the organization. In a final letter distributed on Monday, Rogers urged employees to vote no and made statements that the organization had made mistakes and wanted to be given another chance to improve relationships with the staff without a union.

Union supporters welcomed the outcome of Wednesday’s votes.

“We are thrilled with the overwhelming victory,” said Stephani Lohman, a nurse practitioner who was among those active in the union organizing campaign and was one of the three fired employees. “Over the last few weeks Rogers has shown us exactly why we need a union by running an aggressive anti-worker campaign, trying everything in their toolbox to intimidate and demoralize us, but it failed spectacularly because it was so cruel and wicked that it drove everyone to support the union.”

According to union supporters, the union campaign began late last year after changes at Rogers that included clinicians being reclassified from salaried to hourly, which resulted in schedule changes that increased patient volumes for staff members and reduced individual patient care. The organization increased caseload caps, “forcing caregivers to be responsible for far more patients than previously,” the NUHW said in its statement.

This report has been updated with additional information and comments Thursday from both the National Union of Healthcare Workers and from Rogers Behavioral Health. 

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

A federal judge in Milwaukee rejected a bid from Rogers Behavioral Health Tuesday to block a pair of union elections scheduled for Wednesday at Rogers mental health clinics in West Allis and Madison.

The decision sets the stage for votes to go forward at both clinics. About 35 employees at Rogers’ Madison clinic and about 68 at the West Allis clinic will vote Wednesday on whether to be represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

Rogers, based in Oconomowoc, had argued that the union election should cover all 13 Rogers facilities in Wisconsin — not just the two where employees had actively organized. But in a direction of election issued April 14, the NLRB regional director whose jurisdiction includes Wisconsin said those two clinics alone were each appropriate bargaining units.

On Monday, Rogers lawyers filed a lawsuit to block both elections. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied the mental health nonprofit’s petition for a temporary restraining order Tuesday after an online hearing that ran a little more than 40 minutes.

“I don’t think that they’ve established unconstitutional irreparable harm,” Adelman said of Rogers’ lawyers.

The Rogers lawsuit echoed a recent line of legal challenges that have sought to unravel the National Labor Relations Board — the 91-year-old agency created under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his administration’s New Deal to secure rights for workers and help the U.S. recover from the Great Depression.

One of Rogers’ lawyers, Aron Karabel, argued that the members of the NLRB itself as well as the regional director who issued the union election order are unconstitutional because they aren’t subject to dismissal by the president, violating the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

Similar arguments have been made by other businesses, including Amazon and SpaceX, but the U.S. Supreme Court has not endorsed the claim.

Karabel’s colleague, Hannah Fitzgerald, argued that under Wisconsin law, the NLRB regional director had engaged in “tortious interference” with existing employment contracts for some of the Rogers employees who would be included in the union election bargaining unit. For that reason as well as other reasons, the election could cause “irreparable harm” to Rogers, Fitzgerald asserted.

Representing the NLRB, lawyer Craig Ewasiuk said that a Supreme Court ruling 82 years ago established that individual contracts “may not be availed of or to defeat or delay the procedures prescribed by the National Labor Relations Act” to further collective bargaining.

“The Supreme Court has spoken unambiguously on this question, and you simply can’t bring tortious interference acts against the NLRB for running elections,” Ewasiuk said.

Karabel argued that Rogers’ case was not about collective bargaining — which would prevent the federal court from acting until after final action by the NLRB — and for that reason, the court was an immediately appropriate venue.

The NLRB lawyer rejected that argument. ‘’The employer is essentially trying to stop the board’s proceedings from resolving this underlying labor dispute,” Ewasiuk said.

Staunch resistance to the union

Rogers Behavioral Health has mental health clinics and hospitals in 10 states. Employees are already represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers at four clinics — three in California and one in Philadelphia, Pa. — and at three of those, the union was recognized voluntarily.

But in its home state of Wisconsin, Rogers has taken a much different posture.

Three employees were fired shortly after the union campaigns went public, according to the union, and the NUHW has filed unfair labor practice charges claiming the firings were illegal retaliation for union support.

Rogers has declined to discuss the firings as confidential personnel decisions but has stated they were not in violation of any laws.

From when employees first notified Rogers management of their desire for union representation, however, Rogers has posted notices and issued statements declaring that the mental health nonprofit doesn’t want  union representation for the West Allis and Madison employees.

“Many of your colleagues, your leaders, and I strongly believe that this union is not in the best interests of you, your family or our patients,” said one notice, stating it was from clinic leaders but without a name attached, that was shared with the Wisconsin Examiner. “We believe you should vote no and allow our team the opportunity for positive and direct collaborations.”

In March, Rogers’ executive director of marketing and communications, Maureen Remmel, responded to a question from the Examiner about the difference between Rogers’ responses at its California and Pennsylvania clinics and its handling of the union campaigns in Wisconsin

“While we work in good faith with the NUHW in California and Pennsylvania, our integrated system in Wisconsin is different,” Remmel said in an email message  March 17. “A direct relationship with our Wisconsin team members best serves employees, patients, and the company.”

At an NLRB hearing in February to establish the appropriate bargaining units for the Wisconsin clinics, Rogers’ lawyer argued that flexibility across multiple facilities was important and necessitated allowing all 13 Wisconsin locations to vote on union membership.

A statement attributed to the organization as a whole that Remmel sent April 16, after the election order was issued, asserted, “A union is not right for Rogers Behavioral Health in Wisconsin because it jeopardizes our ability to work together to solve problems quickly and flexibly.”

Jennifer Hadsall, the NLRB regional director, wrote in her analysis that there was little evidence of “functional integration” across the system to overcome the presumption that the two facilities where employees had organized were by themselves appropriate bargaining units.

Hadsall also rejected Rogers’ argument that certain employees were supervisors and therefore not eligible to be part of their facility’s bargaining unit.

Professional consultants

Starting in early February, Rogers has hired consultants to assist in managing its response to the union campaigns, according to LaborLab, a nonprofit based in Helena, Montana. LaborLab monitors the industry of consultants who advise and assist employers in responding to union drives.

Under the federal Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, employers and the consultants they hire to persuade employees “directly or indirectly” about unionizing must regularly file reports with the federal government. Employers file LM-10 reports and consultants file LM-20 reports as well as LM-21 annual financial reports.

While advocates for greater disclosure complain that those reports are often late or incomplete, they offer some information about those businesses.

LaborLab has identified three consultants working for Rogers since early February, when pro-union employees in Madison and West Allis petitioned for voluntary recognition. Two were identified through their LM-20 reports and one was named by union supporters during a radio interview with WORT-FM, the listener-sponsored community radio station in Madison.

LaborLab has estimated the consultants’ fees total about $50,000 a week, or more than $325,000 through April 1. Those don’t include the cost of attorneys representing the business on legal matters connected with the union campaign or “internal costs” that LaborLab’s calculations impute to employees assigned to directly address the union organizing effort.

“It’s hard to be precise because there are a lot of variables in these campaigns,” said Teke Wiggin, LaborLab’s strategic coordinator. “But we think that workers should have some general sense of how much is being invested in these campaigns.”

Wiggin said in an interview that some consultants interact only with corporate managers and executives, while others hold meetings with employees themselves, an action that requires disclosure in federal reports.

“They take arguments that have been crafted by industrial psychologists to sow as much fear and doubt about the value of unionization as possible,” Wiggin said.

In a letter sent to Rogers Feb. 25, 20 local and state elected officials criticized the organization for having “hired union busters” and urged the organization’s CEO to “immediately stop wasting patient care dollars on union busters paid to try to intimidate workers from organizing.”

Rogers did not respond to a question from the Examiner about its use of consultants in the organizing campaign.

In a response to the elected officials that was signed by “Rogers Behavioral Health,” the organization said it has “retained consultants to better understand and address the concerns shared by our employees and to raise awareness about their rights and the election process.”

Messages to employees

In a media statement April 16 after the election was scheduled, Rogers reiterated the organization’s position that a union was not the right choice for its employees and its intention to appeal the regional director’s finding after the election.

The day before, Rogers management emailed employees with a similar message, stating, “We are disappointed and disagree with this decision and are appealing to the full NLRB in Washington, D.C.”

The final line of the message was, “Regardless of the election outcome, bargaining will not start with the union until all appeals have been exhausted.”

The Wisconsin Examiner was provided screenshots of the message.

Employees involved in the union campaigns said that shortly after it landed in their inboxes, that message was remotely deleted, possibly because it was recalled.

On Monday, Rogers distributed another letter at both the West Allis and Madison locations that took up about a page and a half.

“We want to be direct with you today: change is coming to Rogers,” states the letter, photos of which were shared with the Examiner. “You will see it. We are working on it. That is why we are asking you to vote no on Wednesday and allow leadership 12 months to demonstrate to you, your colleagues, patients and families our commitment to making Rogers better than ever.”

Under federal labor law, if a majority of employees vote against a union in a representation election, the employees must wait at least 12 months before seeking a union again.

The members of Rogers’ leadership team “have heard you,” the letter states. “We know that there are things we can do and must do better.”

The letter’s final paragraphs reiterated both the vow to improve relations and a plea to vote against the union.

“The leadership team is committed to doing better. Today we are asking you to please give us 12 months. Vote ‘no’ in the upcoming election and give us a chance to show our commitment in action. If we do not come through for you, the law gives you the right to hold another election. Rogers will honor your choice in that election.

“Please vote ‘no’ on April 22. Vote to hold Rogers leadership accountable.”

Federal court records show Rogers filed its lawsuit to block the vote the same day that employees received that letter.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Employees of two Wisconsin mental health clinics, both part of a national mental health nonprofit based in Oconomowoc, will vote next week on whether to join a union after what has become a highly contested campaign.

Almost two months after a four-day National Labor Relations Board hearing, the NLRB’s Minneapolis-based regional director this week ordered the elections at the clinics, operated by Rogers Behavioral Health in West Allis and Madison.

In the April 14 order, Regional Director Jennifer A. Hadsall rejected Rogers’ position that the election should include all 13 Wisconsin Rogers locations. Hadsall instead directed elections at the West Allis and Madison clinics, where a majority of employees had signed up with the National Union of Healthcare Workers, according to the union.

Union supporters at the Wisconsin clinics have said they decided to seek union representation in response to increased caseloads, changes in how employee productivity was measured and a reduction in individual time that therapists and other providers could spend with patients.

“All of the changes were about increasing the number of patients that were coming into the building,” Stephani Lohman, a nurse practitioner, told the Wisconsin Examiner earlier this year. “It did not seem to have a cohesive plan and no plan would be communicated.”

The NUHW is based in California. After employees at a Rogers clinic in Walnut Creek, California, organized in 2023 and elected the union to represent them in 2023, they negotiated their first contract in 2024.

Employees at two other California clinics and at a clinic in Philadelphia also joined the union, which those three clinics voluntarily recognized.

Union supporters at the West Allis and Madison clinics each sought voluntary recognition of the union after organizing over the past year.

In Wisconsin, however, Rogers declined voluntary recognition, and the employees then filed petitions with the NLRB for union elections.

Lohman worked at the West Allis clinic, known as Lincoln Center, and was among those active in organizing the union. She said she and two other employees were fired after submitting the petition to be recognized. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges claiming that the three firings were in retaliation for union organizing, which is against the law.

In response to an inquiry in March about the firings, Maureen Remmel, Rogers’ executive director for marketing and communications, told the Wisconsin Examiner via email, “We do not comment on confidential personnel matters and have acted in compliance with applicable law.”

Hadsall held a hearing that took place Feb. 23 through Feb. 27 at the NLRB’s office in Milwaukee, where Rogers’ lawyers argued for a bargaining unit of 1,383 employees encompassing all Rogers locations in Wisconsin — three hospitals in the Milwaukee area and 10 outpatient clinics around the state.

Rogers had “a heavy burden” to overcome the presumption that a single facility is an appropriate bargaining unit, Hadsall wrote in her order this week, and she found that management had  failed to do so.

The evidence in how Rogers is organized and supervises its employees was insufficient to overcome a general presumption in U.S. labor law — that a union bargaining unit representing a single health care facility in a larger network or organization is considered appropriate.

Evidence in the case showed that neither of the two clinics had “lost their separate identity such that a single-facility union would be inappropriate,” Hadsall wrote.

Union elections for about 68 employees at the West Allis Lincoln Center clinic and about 35 at the Madison clinic are scheduled for Wednesday, April 22.

For employees at both clinics who have been seeking union representation, the decision was welcome news.

“I’m thrilled and beyond thrilled,” said Erin Quinlan, a behavioral health specialist at the Madison clinic. “It really just vindicated how firm our stance is and how confident we feel about organizing a union and doing so for the Madison clinic.”

Lohman said she and other West Allis employees who have been seeking union representation were pleased as well.

“I’ve just been feeling really overjoyed,” Lohman said Thursday. She and the other fired employees will be able to vote in the West Allis union election, she said.

Rogers Behavioral Health has announced the organization will appeal the order to the full NLRB in Washington, but that will not forestall next week’s voting.

“We are disappointed with the NLRB regional office’s decision to allow separate bargaining units given that Rogers Behavioral Health operates as one unified system across Wisconsin,”  Rogers said in a statement, which Remmel delivered via email. The statement asserted that patients “can move seamlessly between different levels of care, supported by providers who collaborate across locations.”

In her order, however, Hadsall found that there was not sufficient evidence of “functional integration” across the system to overcome the presumption that a single facility is appropriate for a bargaining unit.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE