“It’s shocking the amount of money that health care organizations will spend to go after their own nurses,” Bob Funk told me in a phone interview. “In an industry that’s rife with burnout and understaffing, it just shows you where their priorities are. It’s not with their patients and employees.”

Funk is founder and executive director of LaborLab, a nonprofit that investigates and tracks the doings of labor relations consultants. Or, as they’re known in pro-labor circles, “union busters.”

A year ago this month, DHMC union supporters announced the organizing effort had fallen short and they would not ask the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election at the medical center.

The drive had gotten off to a promising start. By late March, nurse organizers had easily collected enough signatures to meet the NLRB’s 30% threshold to move toward an election.

Winning a simple majority needed to form a collective bargaining unit seemed well within reach.

But that was before the union-busting cavalry arrived in Lebanon.

A year later, Moore still believes a majority of nurses would have voted in favor of unionization, if DHMC “didn’t have so many union-busters in the building.”

DHMC handed out ID badges to the contractors, giving them access to nurses on duty in patient care areas. They hung out in break rooms. They took over vacant patient rooms for one-on-one meetings with nurses who were called away from their jobs to hear anti-union rhetoric that was presented as “just the facts,” Moore said.

Nurses often had the feeling that attendance at the meetings taking place with persuaders during their 12-hour shifts were mandatory, Moore said. If nurses said they were “super busy” with patients, a supervisor would offer to “cover for them,” he added.

Nurses were warned the “family atmosphere,” that DHMC prided itself on would no longer exist in a union shop. With a union standing between them and management, the hospital’s “open door” policy would close. Nurses would lose control over when they could take vacation time or be off on holidays.

Of the half a dozen DHMC nurses I interviewed about the failed union drive, Moore was the only one who agreed to go public, and only because he retired in April.

Moore, 66, continues work to part-time at DHMC as a per-diem nurse in same-day surgery. Other nurses told me they feared retaliation by DHMC management.

“I’m a single mom and wouldn’t want to lose my job,” a nurse said.

Another nurse added, “We’re all terrified at what they might try to do.”

Dartmouth Health policy forbids its employees from speaking publicly about their workplace without authorization from the health care behemoth’s communications and marketing office.

“We do not discipline employees for legally protected speech,” Dartmouth Health spokeswoman Audra Burns said of DH policy.

The federal government has a name for types of consultants hired by DH: persuaders.

“The term ‘persuader’ refers to the efforts by (a) third-party labor relations consultant to persuade employees concerning their union organizing rights,” explains a federal Department of Labor website. “In most cases, a labor relations consultant works to defeat a union organizing drive.”

Dartmouth Health’s spare-no-expense strategy worked.

When I asked Burns about DHMC’s hiring of persuaders, she responded via email, “As is standard with most companies and organizations, we do not provide details about our business relationships with our consultants and vendors. However, we were glad to have found contractors with expertise to help educate our employees and provide them with accurate information about union representation.”

As for giving persuaders carte blanche access (my description, not hers), Burns responded, “Typically, we issue all approved vendors, contractors and freelancers DH ID badges that indicate their role. The issued IDs allow them access to appropriate areas for their contracted services.”

Under federal law, persuaders must file reports with the U.S Office of Labor Management Services about their contracts with employers that describe what they’ve been hired to do.

Employers are required to file similar reports, detailing the amount they’ve spent on persuaders.

Dartmouth Health brought in some of the biggest names in the persuader business, including Crossroads Group Labor Relations Consultants, of San Clemente, Calif., and Quality Labor Solutions, of Los Angeles.

At a rate of $450 an hour, Crossroads assisted Dartmouth Health with its “communications efforts to educate employees” about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act and “provide them with facts and information about third-party representation,” Michael Penn, a partner in the company, told me via email.

For four months of work, Crossroads was paid $88,166, federal Department of Labor records show. Quality Labor Solutions, which billed at $375 per hour, earned $92,621 in four months.

John Logan, a San Francisco State University labor professor, is a nationally-recognized expert on the anti-union industry. When a hospital hires top consultants it’s sending a strong message, he told me in a phone interview.

“It really is like planting a flag saying unions are not welcome here,” Logan said. “They’re letting people know that they’re prepared to do whatever is necessary to defeat the union campaign.”

Persuaders are “extremely effective because the law allows them to do so much,” Logan said.

They can get away telling nurses that “they’re there to educate, not to interfere,” he added.

The nurses I talked with acknowledged that the persuaders were good at their jobs. They presented themselves as “just wanting to be a resource, if you had questions,” Moore said.

Why was Dartmouth Health so intent on convincing its nurses that collectively bargaining for wages, benefits and improvement of working conditions wasn’t in their best interest?

“It’s about power,” said Joan Vogel, a professor of law emerita at Vermont Law and Graduate School who specializes in employment law. “The whole point of having a union is so you have some control over your work environment.”

The group of 50 or so registered nurses who led the effort at DHMC had outside help from the Northeast Nurses Association, which assists health care workers in four states in forming unions. Nela Hadzic, the group’s regional organizing director, spent enough time with DHMC nurses to see what they were up against.

“The outside consultants hired by DHMC succeeded in spreading enough misinformation and fear during the nurses’ attempt to organize last year so that there were entire departments in which nurses only heard about the union from their managers or directly from the union busters,” Hadzic told me via email.

Although the attempt to unionize ultimately failed, it wasn’t for lack of trying, Hadzic said.

“The organizing effort was driven by nurses who were volunteering their time and talking to their co-workers about what forming a union would mean for the improvement of working conditions at their hospital,” she said.

In spite of what the hospital administration would like people to believe, the union drive wasn’t only about “higher pay,” Moore said.

Although nurses would like a more transparent wage scale and better benefits, Moore and other nurses told me that were fighting for the right to negotiate on other matters.

“Nurse-to-patient ratios is the big one,” Moore said.

As a nurse put it in our interview, “with a union, I’d have more of a voice.”

Which is precisely what hospital administrators don’t want, said Logan, the University of San Francisco labor professor. “They do not want to give up unilateral control of the workplace,” he said.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.

CORRECTION: Joan Vogel is a professor of law emerita at Vermont Law and Graduate School. A previous version of this column gave a  n incorrect title for Vogel.