Are Your Charge Nurses Actually Supervisors?

A nursing home in Davenport, Iowa just learned the answer can be no — and it cost them their best defense.

UFCW Local 431 petitioned to represent about 19 RNs and LPNs at Davenport Lutheran Home. The employer’s defense was the classic: nurses can’t unionize, because they’re statutory supervisors who direct the CNAs and CMAs. Win that argument, and there’s no unit and no election.

The employer lost on every count. Per the Region 25 decision, it failed to prove the nurses exercise genuine supervisory authority on any of the indicia — assigning, transferring, disciplining, responsibly directing, rewarding, or adjusting grievances.

Under the Board’s Oakwood framework, supervisory status turns on “independent judgment.” And the day-to-day reality of charge-nurse work usually isn’t that. Telling a CNA to get a resident ice or bring a lunch tray? Routine. Assigning a more experienced CNA to a critically ill patient? Based on known skill, not independent judgment. Swapping two CNAs to defuse a personality clash? Not it either.

The Board found all of it routine (and routine direction doesn’t make you a supervisor).

To me, this is one of the most underestimated exposures in healthcare labor. Employers assume their nurses are “management” because they run the floor. But the legal test isn’t who’s in charge in a general sense — it’s whether they use independent judgment to take specific personnel actions, proven with detailed evidence.

If you’d want your nurses excluded from a bargaining unit, the time to build that proof is now — not at an NLRB hearing during union organizing.