New London — About 60 nurses, medical assistants and other health care workers at the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital Medical Group office building on Howard Street voted overwhelmingly Wednesday against forming a union, rejecting the chance to take a step that was central to last year’s strike and lockout at L+M Hospital.

The vote was 41 against and 18 in favor of forming a bargaining unit that would be affiliated with AFT Connecticut, the same union that represents nurses, technicians and health care workers at the main hospital, Michael Cass, officer in charge of the National Labor Relations Board office in Hartford, said Thursday.

Editor's note: This paragraph has been corrected. Prior to the vote, the union, the hospital and the medical group had filed actions with the NLRB seeking to change the parameters of the vote, with the union arguing that L+M Medical Group workers should be added to the larger union at the hospital. The hospital argued for a standalone unit separate from the main hospital union, and the medical group said the vote should include all of its employees, not just those at the Howard Street location.

Before the vote, the NLRB ruled that vote would be limited to the workers at the Howard Street office building, and that if approved, the union would be a separate bargaining unit. Sixty licensed practical nurses, medical assistants, patient coordinators, patient care navigators and surgical schedulers were eligible to vote.

Matt O’Connor, spokesman for AFT Connecticut, said the union filed an unfair labor practice charge against the medical group on Oct. 16, after the administration began what he characterized as coercive tactics to persuade employees to reject the union. He said the tactics included “captive meetings, literature that was coercive in nature and retaliation against employees for engaging in protected activities.” In the complaint, the union said that the medical group maintained “an unlawful no solicitation/no distribution policy, by prohibiting an employee from distributing union literature in non-work areas during non-working time, and by threatening employees with unspecified reprisals if they select AFT Connecticut as their collective.”

O’Connor said the union has not yet decided whether it will take further action now that the vote has taken place.

In the months leading up to the strike and lockout late last year, the union had raised objections to union jobs being moved out of the main hospital to nonunion positions in outpatient facilities.

“The shifting of services from the main campus to facilities like this (the Howard Street building) was certainly a driving force in the dispute,” O’Connor said.

In the contract agreement reached in February, both sides agreed to follow specific ground rules for labor-management relations that O’Connor said were violated in the weeks before Wednesday’s vote. Melodie Peters, president of AFT, issued a sharply worded statement after the vote charging that Lawrence + Memorial Corp., the parent company of the hospital and the medical group, have broken the agreement.

“That agreement was part of the settlement ending the dispute that led to last year’s protracted and costly lockout of over 800 caregivers at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital,” Peters said. “At the time, LMC’s chief executive officer (Bruce Cummings) said, ‘we respect and value all of our workers’ and that ‘we have come together in a renewed spirit of unity and cooperation.’ But that is not how his management team has conducted themselves in the past two weeks. Instead, they have waged a campaign of coercion, intimidation and harassment against LMMG’s caregivers, in direct violation of the agreed-upon core principles.”

“Today LMMG’s Howard Street facility employees rejected the union that less than a month ago a clear majority favored,” Peters said. “Given this outcome, we will be closely reviewing the tactics employed by LMC management during that time. Regardless of our next steps, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to trust Mr. Cummings or LMC’s current leadership team in the future.”

L+M spokesman Mike O’Farrell said the medical group is pleased with the outcome of the vote and that “we did what we were allowed to do” in providing workers with information prior to the vote.

“The medical group employees let their voices be heard,” he said, “and they have chosen to work together with new leadership to embrace a shared future that has one ultimate goal — to take the best care of its patients and its employees.”

The agreement signed with AFT earlier this year set down core principles for how the union and the administration would work together, he said, “and we worked within those principles and within all guidelines to ensure the medical group employees had all the information they needed to make an informed decision.”

j.benson@theday.com

Twitter: @BensonJudy