Posted on 12/22/2011 8:29:31 PM PST by SmithL
Accusations and bad will registered nearly as loud as the chants outside nine Bay Area hospitals during a 24-hour walkout Thursday morning.
The one-day strike started at 7 a.m. by nurses angry at concessions proposed by the Sutter Health Network during contract negotiations.
At Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, two dozen registered nurses gathered on the chilly Thursday morning. "Patient safety is our goal" they chanted outside the facility's entrance at Webster and Hawthorne streets.
Another dozen or so nurses braved the morning weather to stand outside of Antioch's Sutter Delta Medical Center.
The striking nurses said they are picketing again because Sutter refuses to reverse "take-aways" and implement a contract that matches the one that expired about six months ago.
"We're out here for our patients and ourselves," said Melissa Thompson, a nurse in Sutter Delta's intensive care unit.
"We're fighting for our patients," Winnie Fong said outside the entrance of the Sutter Solano Medical Center in Vallejo where a small, but noisy crowd of nurses and supporters gathered. They were expected to return to work Friday morning.
But Alta Bates Summit Medical Center pledged to lock out the striking nurses in Oakland and Berkeley on Friday instead of letting them return to work and accused them of negotiating in bad faith.
The center's parent company Sutter Health ran ads Thursday in papers and on the radio characterizing the nurses as well paid with generous benefits whose demands would increase health care costs for patients.
"That is insulting to us," Alta Bates nurse Debbie Pease said. "We're nurses. We're not making a lot of money. We're not greedy."
Sutter nurses earn as much as $138,000 on average, however the highest paid can make as much as $291,000, according to the hospital's figures. Fewer than two dozen RNs in 2010 earned that much. Sutter President Patrick Fry earned a $4.7 million compensation package in 2010, according to financial documents.
In February, Fry warned employees in a letter that despite strong earnings the network would have to cut $700 million by 2014 to prepare for the impact of federal health care reforms.
The union did not make any wage demands, said Charles Idelson of the California Nurses Association. Rather, the union called the strike to protest benefit cuts such as Sutter's proposal to cut pay for newly hired RNs by $18 per hour. One of the thorniest issues involves eliminating the up to 12 days of paid sick leave the nurses are currently entitled to.
In addition, nurses in charge of hospital wards would no longer be represented by a union, which Summit ICU nurse Leigha Banderas called "a little scary" because as managers they could be forced to oversee a busy ward as well as patients. That would put patient safety in jeopardy, she said.
The walkout comes exactly three months after the last strike on Sept. 22, which was supposed to last no longer than 24 hours. Alta Bates Summit, however, locked out the striking nurses for five days. An Alta Bates Summit patient, Judith Ming, died as the result of a medical error blamed on one of the replacement nurses provided to the hospital by the Alabama-based Advanced Clinical Employment Staffing.
Advanced Clinical Employment Staffing provided some of the replacement nurses and has a long-standing relationship with the hospital, Sutter spokeswoman Carolyn Kemp said.
They will leave at the end of Friday. But the full-time Sutter nurses will have to decide on what to do next if the concessions are not resolved.
One man, Kevin Wong, said he was concerned about the strike's effect on care of his mother in Summit's ICU.
"But what are you going to do?" he added.
"Patient safety is our goal" and "We're fighting for our patients,"Lies and more lies.
138k and they’re striking. Fire the lot of them.
Agreed! And WHAT relevance does the hospital president’s compensation have for ANY of this?
“We’re out here for our patients...
Uhhh....yeah. But aren’t they back in the hospital?
Yeah, just like the teacher's unions chanting, "Its for the children!" "Patient safety" is a just a ruse - if it is all about patient safety, what happens to patient safety when they are striking?
And the following is from Wikipedia:
On February 18, 2009, CNA/NNOC announced that it is joining with two other nurses unions, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and the United American Nurses, to create a 150,000-member union. The organization is called National Nurses United[5] and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
Unionization will cut medical productivity in half. More doctors than ever before are hospital employees, so what do you think they will do? And if insurance companies form ACOs and employ unionized doctors, a strike will mean fewer patients receive care. That would mean more profit for the ACO/insurance company.
I’m not taking sides on the merits of the strike, but FYI, Chuck Idelson was a longtime writer for the Communist Party USA newspaper, the Peoples Weekly World. His predecessor was also a CPUSA stalwart, Carl Bloice, the PWW’s Moscow correspondent for many years.
Looks like the CNA has a propensity for reds to handle their PR.
In 2001, my hospital voted in the Mass Nurses Association. We were sure they would not lead us to strike, but sure enough, they did. I walked because I supported the issue(unsafe mandatory overtime)but I learned a lot and eventually left the hospital because of the union.
MNA and CNA are joined at the hip and are VERY radical unions.
I and most nurses I know would never walk over money, but the union is very good at manipulating issues to best serve their agenda.
In 2001, my hospital voted in the Mass Nurses Association. We were sure they would not lead us to strike, but sure enough, they did. I walked because I supported the issue(unsafe mandatory overtime)but I learned a lot and eventually left the hospital because of the union.
MNA and CNA are joined at the hip and are VERY radical unions.
I and most nurses I know would never walk over money, but the union is very good at manipulating issues to best serve their agenda.
I know. I have nurses in the family.
I wouldn't advise anybody to become a nurse.
The CNA is a pack of hard lefties & if I recall, have ties to SEIU and/or the AFL-CIO.
12 sick days?? I work in a pediatric hospital where the patients are like little bioterrorists but I only get 5 sick days. And I don’t know too many staff nurses pulling in 6 figures.
Whiney princesses.
It is beyond a shadow of a doubt the CNA is not about the nurses...my wife's rep is a SEIU guy, bounces back and forth from CNA to SEIU. We're pretty sure they are manipulating the union votes whenever they can (what's the point of driving the ballots back to Sacramento in the trunk of his car for counting, anyway?). However it is absolutely true the Nurses need a union or a professional association, they have a professional responsibility to the patients (dictated by law, so they can't just follow orders and avoid responsibility). There is a need to strike a balance with the employer's agressive management objectives. Contracts are a good idea.
That being said, the union has defaulted on it's responsibility to negotiate, the negotiators are a bunch of idiots. Sutter has some very agressive management and the CNA needs some real representation on the job, not a bunch of activist puppets. The nurses ought to lock out all the SEIU sympathizers and hire some serious talent vs letting union dues support Democrat party sycophants.
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