Mar 21, 2008 1:30 pm US/Pacific
Bay Area Sutter Health Nurses Launch 10-Day Strike
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ―
About 4,000 nurses at eight Sutter Health hospitals in the Bay Area started striking Friday over a dispute about health care and pension benefits and the closing of hospitals in poor areas.
The strike was expected to last 10 days. It is the third region-wide nurses strike in the past six months. The last occured in October.
Friday's strike affected the following hospitals: St. Luke's Hospital and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, San Leandro Hospital, Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center in Berkeley and Oakland, Mills-Peninsula Health Services in Burlingame and San Mateo, Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, Sutter Delta in Antioch and Sutter Solano in Vallejo.
Hospital officials said they brought in replacement nurses and that patient care wouldn't be disrupted. All hospitals remained open.
The California Nurses Association said the walkout was triggered by ongoing contract negotiations and Sutter practices that it claims put patients at risk.
The nurses association said it is also protesting Sutter's alleged attempt to close three community hospitals in the Bay Area that serve a patient population that is poorer and composed of more people of color than other Sutter hospitals.
"It is very difficult to take these steps," intensive care nurse Sharon Tobin said of making the decision to strike. "We really want to be in there taking care of the patients, but we understand that we have to take care of them in different ways."
"Registered nurses are all that stand between our patients and corporate health care," Tobin added as she walked the picket line outside Mills-Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame.
Sutter Health said it has met the levels of staffing that the union has demanded from other hospitals.
Bill Gleeson, a spokesman for Sutter Health, added that the nurses are well paid, receive free health care and a generous retirement plan.
He said the union's "real goal is more members and more dues money."
The hospital chain said if the union recruits the more than 3,000 Sutter Health nurses not currently in the union, it would receive around $4 million more a year in membership dues.
Shum Preston, spokesman for the California Nurses Association, said that claim "is not what nurses are about. It's not why nurses are out here."
Each hospital under the Sutter Health umbrella negotiates a contract separately with its nurses, California Pacific Medical Center spokesman Kevin McCormack noted.
Instead of waiting for a new contract with the nurses association, he said California Pacific gave all of its nurses, union and non-union, a 6 percent pay increase as of January of this year.
California Pacific offered its nurses a contract that will raise the average salary to more than $140,000 a year while improving retirement benefits and giving nurses and their families' free, no-premium healthcare, McCormack said.
McCormack said that only two-thirds of the registered nurses at California Pacific are union members, and non-union nurses have stated they think safety standards and benefits at the hospital are good.
"When CNA refers to 'Sutter Health' they need to be more specific, just because one hospital might have a problem with staffing does not mean that all of the hospitals have staffing problems," McCormack said. "We are a Sutter Health affiliate, but each hospital is a separate entity."
"My experience has been very different from the allegations made by CNA," oncology nurse Rosangel Klein said in a statement issued through the hospital. "We have always had adequate staffing and this year actually the staffing has gotten even better."
The California Nurses Association and its national arm, the National Nurses Organizing Committee, have a total of about 80,000 members in 50 states.
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