|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Over 400 healthcare workers at Planned Parenthood’s largest affiliate started voting Monday to decide whether to join a local chapter of Service Employees International Union, known as SEIU.
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte operates 30 healthcare clinics in Nevada and California, including one in Redwood City and seven others around the Bay Area, according to the organization’s website.
Clinicians, nurses, and health service specialists launched the drive to join SEIU Local 521 in response to pauses and potential loss of federal funding under the Trump administration, including a one-year pause in Medicaid funding last year, according to a spokesperson for SEIU Local 521, Ian Newman.
The chapter affiliate would be called Planned Parenthood Mar Monte Workers United.
The local chapter of the labor organization represents 72,000 workers in various fields in public and nonprofit sectors of the Bay Area, Central Coast and Central Valley, according to the organization.
“Our effort to unionize reflects the immense changes rippling across the healthcare sector, as we want a voice in how care is delivered during a period of rapid political change,” said Isabel Arezu Elias, a physician assistant and member of the union’s organizing committee at the Capitol Plaza Clinic in Sacramento.
SEIU Local 521 said in a statement that the Trump administration’s scrutiny of Planned Parenthood made unionizing necessary to ensure stable pay, staffing levels and working conditions. Unionized employees have secured such things at Planned Parenthood affiliates elsewhere in California and in other states, the union said.
A request for comment from Planned Parenthood Mar Monte on Tuesday afternoon was not returned by press time.
The Trump administration withheld federal funding last year, known as Title X grants, that are given to family planning clinics for low-income Americans as part of the Public Health Service Act of 1944. It also withheld Medicaid payments for a range of services for one year as part of the law known as the Big Beautiful Bill, or HR 1. Those services included wellness exams, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection (STI) tests and treatment, and birth control and other essential care, according to Planned Parenthood’s lobbying arm, Planned Parenthood Action, which said the administration is trying to make the cuts permanent.
The Trump administration said the organization is not eligible for the funds because it provides abortions and medication abortions as part of its reproductive healthcare services.
Title X grants were released in December after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, known as the NFPRHA, which includes many Planned Parenthood affiliates.
The lawsuit was dropped in January after the $68.5 million in funding was restored, but Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement at the time that the organization doubted the fight would be over.
“We know that the Trump administration will continue to attack reproductive freedom, and the ACLU will be ready to use every lever we have to fight those attacks and defend the Title X program,” said Amiri.
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte serves over 320,000 patients a year, according to the organization. It has five locations in Santa Clara County, two in Alameda County, one in San Mateo County, one in Santa Cruz County and two in Monterey County.
Stacy Cross, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s CEO, wrote in the organization’s seasonal report for winter 2026 that the previous year had been challenging.
“Last year was, without a doubt, the most difficult year our organization has ever faced,” she wrote in her letter introducing the report.
She said the organization was bracing for deeper Medicaid cuts in 2027.
SEIU Local 527 said in a statement that workers in healthcare safety-net jobs already operate in sectors with complicated and inconsistent funding streams and that the uncertainty created by the Trump administration made unionizing the best way to ensure pay and staffing levels wouldn’t suffer.
The vote on whether to join the union will conclude on May 19.
This story was written by Thomas Hughes for Bay City News Service.
