A jury has ordered a labor union to pay $ 17.3 million to the health care organization, Sutter Health for a defamation campaign unleashed against the hospitals run by the organization.
The Placer County jury found that Unite Here, one of the nation's largest unions, defamed Sutter Health early last year by mass mailing postcards to women of child-bearing age in Northern California. The postcards claimed that the organization's hospitals used unclean linens. The union was in a labor dispute with the laundry service that cleaned the linens at the time.
Sutter Health runs a number of Bay Area hospitals, including Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley and Oakland, Mills-Peninsula Health Services in Burlingame and Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch.
"We are pleased that leaders of Unite Here have been held legally accountable for recklessly frightening patients and the public through outrageous and false allegations," said Michael Roosevelt, chairman of Sutter Health's board of directors.
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