I am a paramedic who has been in this career for 5 years. In this time, I have worked for 5 different ambulance services and 2 city area hospitals. I don't know how I haven't shared this earlier, but this is what I remember from working for the most prestigious ambulance company, American Medical Response (AMR), which is an extension/the same thing as Global Medical Response – the largest ambulance company in the world. I had just started working at this company for a couple of weeks when I was approached by a gentleman who handed me a card to fill out and informed me of the benefits of a union. I was intrigued and signed and returned the card.
I was still learning the ropes at this point, but within a month of this happening, I was approached by a supervisor after dropping off a patient and he had a binder detailing why a union was bad. Within a week of this, all of the employees within our divison of AMR were required to attend a meeting about why a union was bad. The most “damning” point they had was that the person in charge of the union that was representing our division makes about 10 times as much as the average employee. I was not impressed. The president of my division likely makes the same if not more, as does every single corporate-level executive at this for-profit ambulance company across America.
The vote came and went, and the union was squashed. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the vote was squashed something like 12-140 people who voted. The union-busting tactics were working. I heard every single trope in the book from my coworkers as to why they voted no. The person who handed me my card was fired for being late too many times. Everyone showed up late here and there and never received any sort of punishment including myself. A person with a wife and two children was abruptly fired for a similar bs reason because he was openly advocating for the union. A year and a half later, he got his job back as well as back-pay, which I heard was a few thousand dollars, nowhere near what he was entitled to.
About a year later, I felt the burn from the company, and regretted my non-activism from before. I was approached illegally by a supervisor while I was working and he used specific language that could have been used against the company while they were practicing their union-busting strategies. Ultimately, it probably would not have made a difference, but I was subpeona'd by a lawyer for the NLRB, and I chose to ignore it. I had done a bit of Googling and didn't take long for me to find out that this is not an isolated incident. A division in Las Vegas had dealt with the EXACT same thing a few months prior. I had seen another division of AMR excited to announce they were having a union vote, only for it to be crushed a month later. AMR was literally using a playbook for squashing unions, and it was up to my direct supervisors, some of which I had actually been in school with, to ensure the union didn't happen.
I worked for AMR about 2 1/2 years. At some point I had applied for a promotion and didn't get it, only to find the people who did receive the job were far less professional and skilled than I was. I quit shortly after. Today I make a living wage with the credentials I have, but screw AMR. Screw EMS in general because as long as I have been employed in EMS, it has proven a dead-end job supplemented by young, inexperienced EMTs just to keep the wheels on the road.