National Nurses United

NewsBriefs:2 7/22/09 10:25 PM Page 5 process to also pressure Sutter to keep St. Luke's a hospital with a robust range of services and change the plan so that the healthcare needs of San Francisco are prioritized. And the fights with Sutter are just starting to simmer elsewhere. In the other Bay Area cities of Berkeley and Oakland, where Sutter owns Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, it plans to close its psychiatric hospital, Herrick, and move those services to its Summit campus in Oakland, for a total net loss of almost 40 beds. At the same time, Sutter plans to rebuild the Summit campus at twice the square footage, but with 36 fewer beds and, again, all private rooms. In the North Bay Area community of Santa Rosa, Sutter in 2007 tried to shut down Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, but the hospital was salvaged from closure in 2008 by a CNA/NNOC and community campaign and tough action by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. Sutter plans, however, to rebuild Santa Rosa with half the number of beds. RNs say that what is happening to San Leandro Hospital, St. Luke's Hospital, and the entire region is part of a Sutter pattern of taking over public-sector and community hospitals while promising to continue to meet the health needs of the community, transferring profitable services to its hospitals located in higher-income areas, and then attempting to shutter the first group of hospitals, or shrink or dump money-losing services at them. Without facilities in lower-income areas, it will likely not have to provide much in the way of charity care since uninsured, poorly insured, and Medi-Cal patients will not have easy access to hospitals far across town or in another city entirely. Already, Sutter has one of the worst track records among nonprofit hospital chains for providing charity care. According to the latest available data for San Francisco, Sutter in 2006 collected nearly $70 million more in tax benefits that it provided in charity care. RNs are determined to keep these Sutter hospitals open and running as full-service, acute-care facilities. "My mom lives with me and is a breast cancer patient," said Leslie Silket, an RN at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center and a San Leandro resident. "[San Leandro] is her hospital. All her doctors are there. The infusion center is just across the parking lot. If we take these older people out of their comfort zone, it's going to be awful." —staff report JUNE 2009 Saint Agnes, a Poster Child for EFCA CALIFORNIA O n may 27, 150 California Central Valley RNs, community members, and local union members attended a blue ribbon hearing before the Fresno Fair Elections Commission on union busting by Saint Agnes Medical Center's management during a 2008 CNA/NNOC union election campaign. A half dozen Saint Agnes RNS provided personal testimony about the actions of the Fresno hospital in front of a panel that included state Sen. Dean Florez, majority leader of the Senate who flew in from Sacramento for the meeting, and an aide for Henry Perea, president of the Fresno City Council. After the emotional testimony of the nurses, Florez pledged he would meet with the medical center's executives and have them account for their behavior. "We were astonished by the brutal tactics deployed in response to us asserting our democratic right to form a union," said Susan Whitfield, a former Saint Agnes RN. "It was foreign to us; there were things you heard in the news under dictatorships, not here in the U.S. and not here in our hometown." Many of the RNs pointed out that if the Employee Free Choice Act had been in place, nurses could have unionized without the intense fear and intimidation that marked their election. Known as EFCA, the proposed legislation now before Congress would allow workers to unionize by collectW W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G ing a simple majority of signed authorization cards. The bill also would allow a third-party arbitrator to decide disputes and require employers to bargain in good faith for a first contract. Currently, unionizing elections through the National Labor Relations Board process are often skewed in favor of employers, who essentially control access to and have the power to fire voters. Such was the case with Saint Agnes. In early 2007, after a steady downward spiral and broken promises in patient care and staffing conditions, Saint Agnes RNs began an organizing campaign to win professional representation with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. Many of the 850 RN staff enthusiastically signed union cards when management launched a 15-month union busting campaign against the RNs. Saint Agnes is under the ownership and management of Trinity Health, the fourthlargest Catholic healthcare services corporation in the United States. Though the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued directives saying employees have the right to organize into a union and bargain collectively and Pope Benedict XVI has also supported the work of unions, Saint Agnes' actions towards its nurses ran contrary to church doctrine. Saint Agnes hired not one, but two professional anti-union consulting groups to defeat the vote by RNs to unionize. Surveillance REGISTERED NURSE 5

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