County Nurses Strike Points Up the Need for Arbitration

It somehow seems out of character for those “angels of mercy,” the Los Angeles County nurses, to vociferously complain on picket lines and in a suit that county supervisors are racist, sexist and foolish, to boot.

Some may have sounded a bit strident, perhaps, but their complaints are not frivolous and are being echoed frequently these days by nurses around the nation at private and public hospitals.

It was illegal for 4,000 Los Angeles County nurses to demonstrate the depths of their unhappiness by going on strike at County-USC Medical Center.

However, often government workers have no choice. They either strike illegally or continue working with the wages and job conditions unilaterally imposed on them by government managers, a system more understandable in totalitarian countries than in the United States.

Consider the strike issue first and then the bitter accusations made by the nurses.

There were cries of outrage from conservatives and cheers from liberals when the California Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that almost all who work for the state or local governments have the same freedom to strike that non-government workers have.

Excluded from that “free-at-last” ruling were government workers who would endanger the public health and safety by striking. Illogically, however, the court offered no alternative to workers forbidden to strike.

In contrast, laws in Ohio, Illinois and a few other states allow government employees who are barred from striking to take unresolved contract disputes with government managers to neutral arbitrators for binding decisions. Even most federal employees, all of whom are forbidden by law from striking, are given the alternative of arbitrating contract disputes other than those dealing with wages and fringe benefits that are fixed by the President and Congress.

The U.S. Postal Service takes the sensible next step: Its workers can go to arbitration on all contract issues, including those involving wages and benefits.

The county’s nurses struck for three days last month but were forced to end their walkout by a Superior Court judge who, following the state high court’s ruling, held that the strike could hurt the public.

It is difficult to argue against the general notion that there should be a way to avoid such potentially harmful strikes, although there are no laws taking away the freedom of nurses to strike in private hospitals. Likewise, there are no restrictions barring strikes against privately owned utilities, such as gas and electric companies, even if this too might cause health and safety problems.

Still, common sense suggests that a major prolonged strike by nurses at such institutions as Los Angles County-USC Medical Center could be harmful.

As brief as the strike was, non-emergency operations were delayed, some patients were discharged early and many were moved to other hospitals that were reluctant to take them because most county hospital patients are too poor to pay the costs.

The California Legislature should solve the problem as Congress did for postal workers and as other state legislatures have for state employees: require arbitration as an alternative to strikes that may pose a public danger.

In a free society, no workers, including those in government, should be forced to accept terms of employment dictated by government officials, who have been known to be fallible at times.

Now, about the nurses’ contention that Los Angeles County officials are racist, sexist and foolish.

It does seem foolish for the conservative majority on the county Board of Supervisors to offer no better than average wages and job conditions to attract more nurses. Everyone agrees that there is a critical shortage of nurses nationwide, and especially at County-USC Medical Center, the nation’s largest acute-care hospital.

“The United States is facing the most serious nursing shortage in its history, and it is particularly acute in the Western states, including California,” according to a just-released report from the respected Wyatt Co., an international pay and benefits consulting firm.

The executive in charge of Wyatt’s Southern California division, James Finkelstein, sounded more like the striking nurses than an officer of a company whose clients include the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, which represents hospital management.

It makes little sense, he said, to require nurses to work longer and to hire less qualified people to fill vacancies because such moves are leading to a decline in the quality of hospital care.

“Ultimately,” he concluded, “better pay and benefits, improved working conditions and a totally changed perception about the role of nursing is necessary to turn the situation around.”

There is no debate about the need for substantial improvements at the gigantic County-USC. The hospital itself says it is short almost 900 nurses needed to care for the nearly 100,000 patients admitted there each year and an additional 480,000 patients flooding its emergency rooms and outpatient clinics.

When the strike began, the top pay for regular staff nurses in the county nurses was $2,451 a month, slightly below the community average and well below pay for nurses at hospitals such as Cedar-Sinai, Centinela and Kaiser.

The pay raise offered by the county--14.5% over the next two years--would improve the county nurses’ relative standing only slightly and doesn’t take into consideration another hard-to-ignore factor: County-USC nurses, like the rest of the staff there, work harder and under more crowded and stressful conditions than their counterparts in any almost any other hospital in America.

So it does seem foolish, then, not to do everything possible to adequately reward nurses already at County-USC and to attract more much-needed nurses to those difficult jobs. It will not be easy, though, as Stephen W. Gamble, president of the hospital council, wrote in this newspaper recently.

Both the state and federal governments must do more to resolve the problem. Gamble bitingly suggested that one answer would be “to reorder the priorities at the state level, where we have a billion-dollar surplus in the bank while babies are dying for lack of care.”

The accusation of racism and sexism in Los Angeles County government stems in part from the fact that pay in jobs dominated by women and minorities is not comparable to the pay for comparable jobs handled mainly by white males.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents 47,000 Los Angeles County workers, including nurses, has filed a “comparable worth” suit against the county alleging wage discrimination based on both race and sex.

John J. Sweeney, the international’s president, said it is “tragic that if you are black or Hispanic or female and you work for Los Angeles County, the chances are very good that you are paid unfairly.”

It may be unseemly for usually polite, often subservient nurses to accuse their bosses of sexism and racism and of offering foolish answers to the nursing shortage. And apparently it is illegal for the nurses to strike in protest.

However, it is banning strikes without providing an alternative that is wrong. Further, county officials are not acting wisely enough to deal with the nursing problems. And there is at least enough substance to the charges of sexism and racism to force the supervisors to defend themselves in court.

Independents Could Help AFL-CIO Image

Leaders of the AFL-CIO helped increase the unity of organized labor but didn’t improve the federation’s public image when they readmitted the Teamsters Union last year, 30 years after the union was kicked out because of corruption among its leaders.

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland will further increase labor unity and brighten the federation’s image at the same time if he can help figure out a way to bring into the organization other independent unions whose reputations, unlike the Teamsters, have never been soiled.

Unfortunately, despite some valiant effort by leaders of teachers unions in California, there seems to be little possibility for an AFL-CIO affiliation by the 1.8-million-member National Education Assn. anytime soon. The NEA is a major political force in this country and an effective union for teachers that enjoys a solid reputation for integrity.

More likely to provide help for the AFL-CIO image-building effort are the current encouraging affiliation talks with the West Coast International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union. The union serves its 55,000 members well and has an unblemished reputation for honesty.

Another likely candidate for affiliation soon is the United Mine Workers, which, despite disastrous conduct by some of its former leaders, would be a bright name to add to the AFL-CIO membership roster.

And it will help, too, to admit into the labor federation the 30,000-member Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which has asked for affiliation after 125 years as an independent union.

These unions would be image-brighteners as well as unity-enhancers for the AFL-CIO.