In late May, the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) issued a press release announcing that around 25,000 registered nurses (RNs) in California and Minnesota issued one-day strike notices because of patient care issues in contract negotiations at their facilities. The fulfillment of this strike is expected to take place on Thursday, July 10. All the nurses going on strike are members of National Nurses United, the nation?s largest professional association and union for RNs.
Over 12,000 of those nurses are set to hold a one-day walkout in California, in what could become the largest RN strike in the history of the United States. Affected hospitals include University of California hospitals in San Francisco, Davis, Los Angeles, Irvine, and San Diego, as well as San Pedro Hospital, Citrus Valley Medical Center, and Marina del Rey Medical Center in Los Angeles County.
Key issues for RNs participating in this one-day strike include retirement rights and safe-staffing principles. The state of California already regulates minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, but California nurses hope for enforcement of safe-staffing to be strengthened and protected from the industry which wants the ratios relaxed. Nurses also want further patient protections regarding nursing care, including guarantees that nurses who work 12-hour days are allowed rest and meal breaks during their shifts to ensure that patients are being treated by capable, health caregivers.
However, the RNs going on strike are already facing difficulty. Today, only two days in advance of the proposed walkout, nurses are going to court to defend their democratic right to strike over concerns about patient care conditions in University of California medical centers. The UC administration, along with the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) have taken legal action in an attempt to block this strike.
Nurses claim that this is the correct step to take next, having failed to achieve improvements to staffing conditions at UC hospitals despite multiple efforts, months of contract talks, and a fact finding process that revealed frightening statistics regarding patient care.
For instance, last year at UC Davis Medical Center, one-third of shifts were at least one RN short of what was required by patient acuities on those shifts in each unit. UCSF has also reneged on agreements to improve staffing ratios and implement a dedicated break relief program, especially in medical, post-surgical, and intermediate care units.
?It is very telling that UC administrators are devoting more effort, and squandering tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, trying to block the nurses? right to advocate for patients than in working with the nurses to fix their substantial patient care problems,? said Beth Kean, the California Nursing Association's (CNA?s) UC division director.
Kean views the intervention by PERB as ?another in a long line of attacks on nurses, staffing ratios and workers in California by the Schwarzenegger administration which has been one of the most hostile to patients, nurses, and working people in decades."
?The flimsy arguments advanced by PERB suggest active collusion between that supposedly public agency and the notorious anti-union law firm, Littler Mendelson, hired by UC to fight its nurses and other employees," she said.
Meanwhile, PERB and and the UC system have claimed that the strike would violate a no-strike provision in the nurses' current contract, as well as represent bad-faith bargaining and put patients at risk.
"Patient safety should not be leveraged by CNA leadership as a negotiation tactic," Dwaine Duckett, UC vice president in charge of human resources, said in a statement. "Hopefully, the union leadership will now refocus and join us at the bargaining table."
Strike notices were canceled at three small California because of progress in negotiations and tentative agreements. San Francisco Bay Area hospitals still cringe over the last nurses' strike in 2008 during which unionized nurses walked out for 10 days at 8 local hospitals operated by Sutter Health. It has been recommended that nurses in the UC system receive a 4 percent wage increase, which would put them on par with hospitals in the same market, and nurses have agreed, but maintain that staffing and patient safety are the primary motivators in this strike.