A delayed union organizing campaign at a Madison-based nonprofit healthcare cooperative has sparked dissent in the co-op about how the organization is governed.
When Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin holds its annual meeting for members Thursday evening, a group of patients who are co-op members will seek a vote to undo a recent change in the co-op’s bylaws.
The conflict at Group Health follows a stalled union organizing drive at the co-op — GHC for short — that began in 2024.
After Group Health employees filed their petition for a union, Group Health’s board and management distributed messages criticizing the union. GHC lawyers also told federal officials they would not accept the union’s proposal that specified which groups of employees would be represented by the union.
Patients who sign up with Group Health for their healthcare become members of the cooperative. Some long-time members contend the co-op management’s response to the union campaign is at odds with the co-op’s founding principles and its progressive heritage.
“It just seems like the cooperative seems to be drifting away from wellness and more and more into making money and growing,” said Ruth Brill, a Group Health member since 1979 who supports the unionizing campaign. Healthcare providers “wanted to serve us better” by seeking a union, she said. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
Co-op members have formed the GHC Members Union Support Team — GHC-MUST for short.
At Thursday’s meeting the group is recommending that members vote against accepting the minutes from the co-op’s 2025 membership meeting — usually a formality — to demonstrate their opposition to how the meeting was conducted, said Amihan Huesmann, one of the co-op patients and members.
The group has also endorsed three non-incumbents for the co-op board, in an election that was held partly online through Tuesday, June 23, and will also take votes in person at the meeting.
Members oppose GHC’s union stance
In October 2025 at a special meeting, co-op members proposed and voted for a series of resolutions directed at the co-op board.
One resolution called for the co-op to voluntarily recognize the Service Employees International Union in the departments and jobs where employees had originally asked for union representation.
Other resolutions directed the board, co-op management or both to report how much money co-op management had spent on legal or consulting fees in response to the union campaign and to issue a report on all emails, communications, meeting minutes and other documents relating to the co-op’s handling of the union drive.
Another resolution demanded the board and co-op management “faithfully follow the democratically expressed will” of co-op members, who, the resolution charged, have “been denied an opportunity to duly and fully exercise [their] role” in leading the co-op. A fifth resolution called for the board to hold a meeting by mid-January 2026 “on the democratization of GHC governance.”
In December 2025, the board declined all five resolutions as written.
By the end of 2025, SEIU Wisconsin and Group Health were at an impasse in a tangled legal dispute over who would be included in the union.
SEIU filed a long list of unfair labor practice charges stating that Group Health had illegally retaliated against union supporters. The union obtained a National Labor Relations Board order to block a planned representation election until the charges were resolved.
GHC and the union negotiated a confidential settlement to resolve the unfair labor practice charges that put the union organizing drive on hold.
Seeking stronger governance role
Since January, the GHC-MUST group has been pursuing changes to the organization’s bylaws that they contend would restore a stronger role for members in the co-op’s governance. The group also circulated a petition to recall the chair of the co-op board.
Under the bylaws in place when the group was circulating their proposals, bylaws proposals and recall petitions required 100 signatures. When the group delivered their bylaws proposals and the recall petition, however, their submission was rejected, with GHC’s board citing a change to the bylaws that the board had just enacted.
The board in March made “some wholesale changes without member input, without an explanation of why they were needed, without talking about the serious ramifications for members,” said Steve Rankin, a Group Health member who has been active in GHC-MUST.
A key change that the board made increased the threshold for submitting a bylaws revision proposal from 100 members to 3% of Group Health’s 54,693 Class A voting members, according to GHC — about 1,640 people.
“They changed the bylaws without informing members that it was happening and without including members,” said Huesmann, a Group Health member for two decades who had worked on the members’ proposals.
Marty Anderson, chief strategy and business development officer for GHC, said that “the bylaws do not require an announcement to the membership prior to the bylaws change being considered by the board of directors.”
Group Health increased the bylaws change threshold “such that a small minority of people can’t change how the cooperative operates for the other 69,900 people who are part of the cooperative,” Anderson said.
While Huesmann and Rankin contend the board’s changes were aimed at thwarting their petitions, Anderson said the board’s changes “were happening outside of the knowledge of those petitions happening.”
Huesmann said the petitions were widely circulated and publicized in the weeks before they were submitted, however. The campaign “wasn’t secret,” Huesmann said. “It’s not like we were hiding that we were circulating petitions.”
Rankin said the changes amount to a power grab.
“It doesn’t ensure broader member participation, it ensures members are no longer able to do that,” Rankin said. “They just made it an inaccessible framework instead of one that would be accessible.”
