Labor Shortage Aids Nurses in Walkout at Kaiser Hospital : Health care: No negotiations set as strike hits two-week mark. Allegations traded over whether the quality of care has dropped.

Usually when a strike drags on for two or three weeks, employers begin to feel they have the upper hand. Workers begin getting nervous and worrying about next month’s mortgage payment. Some begin to trickle back across the picket line.

But the nationwide shortage of nurses apparently has wiped out that traditional management advantage in the strike by 900 registered nurses at Kaiser Permanente’s Sunset Boulevard medical center in Hollywood.

The strikers--easily able to find temporary work through scores of placement firms that fill daily vacancies in Southern California hospitals--are sweating nary a drop. As a result, the 13-day-old work stoppage at the 600-bed hospital, the high-tech jewel of Kaiser’s Southern California hospital network, seems likely to drag on for months.

“We’re not worried at all. We have plenty of work,” said Gloria David on Friday as she carried a picket sign.

“We recognized early on that this could be a long strike,” Kaiser spokeswoman Janice Fowler Seib said.

With no negotiations in sight, administrators and strikers traded allegations over whether the quality of care has dropped since the nurses walked out.

Local 535 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents strikers at Kaiser Sunset and a small facility in Inglewood, called a press conference featuring two patients who believed that their cases had been mishandled by the Kaiser system during the strike.

A Kaiser spokeswoman denied the claims and complained that the public was being “unnecessarily worried and frightened by the (striking) nurses’ self-serving behavior.”

Nurses are striking the Sunset facility primarily because of Kaiser’s attempt to roll back overtime premiums that in some cases pay nurses 2 1/2 times their base wage.

The nurse shortage has enabled unionized nurses throughout the nation to obtain hospital contracts raising wages far beyond the cost of living, even though hospitals are under intense pressure to cut costs. Nurses contend that large raises are needed to encourage more people to enter the profession.

Kaiser, which pays its registered nurses about $40,000 a year after five years, followed this pattern earlier this year by approving a contract with another union--United Nurses Assn. of California, an affiliate of the American Federation of State, City and Municipal Employees International--for the 4,000 nurses who work in eight of Kaiser’s 10 Southern California hospitals. The United Nurses pact granted raises of at least 20% over three years.

But the SEIU Local 535 prides itself on being a tougher bargaining organization than United Nurses and believes that nurses at Kaiser Sunset deserve even higher wages because they work in units that require more technical training, such as the bone marrow transplant unit and the cardiac surgery unit. SEIU sought 34% raises over three years.

Kaiser resisted and also made a pointed attempt to take back contract provisions on overtime. Premium overtime--overtime paid at a rate of greater than time and a half--has risen by 300% at Kaiser Sunset in the last three years, hospital officials say. “We want to bring (Local 535) back into line,” spokeswoman Seib said. “The fact that we have a strike going on now underscores our determination to work toward controlling costs.”

Nurses, contending that the cuts in overtime effectively pared back most of the net wage increase that Kaiser was offering, struck on May 13. Kaiser responded by transferring about two-thirds of the Kaiser Sunset patients to other community hospitals or, in some cases, to other Kaiser hospitals.

The strike, coming a month after an eight-day strike by 11,000 Kaiser clerical and maintenance workers throughout the Southern California system, rapidly turned contentious.

The most recent evidence occurred Friday when Miriam Kavis, the mother of a premature infant born at Kaiser Sunset in February and transferred to Kaiser’s West Los Angeles hospital two weeks before the strike began, appeared at a union press conference to complain about her daughter’s care.

Kavis said a data-monitoring and alarm machine attached to her daughter was unplugged at the West Los Angeles facility. Seib said the baby’s health was not threatened by the incident. Kathy Sackman, president of the United Nurses Assn., which represents nurses at the West Los Angeles facility, said the machine in question was a backup unit and that the same mistake could have as easily have been made by nurses at Kaiser Sunset.

But striking nurse Cathy Mitchell, who said she had taken care of Kavis’ baby at Kaiser Sunset, said the incident illustrated the potential danger that Kaiser is risking by failing to settle with the nurses.

“I feel very badly about it because I’d rather be working . . . because I took care of that baby many times. . . . Do I feel guilty? Yes. But I’m not going back in there until we have a contract that’s equitable,” she said.

Strikers have been angered by several mangement actions before and during the strike:

- Three days before the strike began, Kaiser officials began discussing the possibility of cutting off the nurses’ health benefits if they struck, according to an interoffice memorandum. That strategy has yet to be implemented.

- Administrators also sent letters before the strike to Filipino nurses who held temporary-worker visas implying that their immigration status might be affected by their participation in a strike. The union subsequently sued the Immigration and Naturalization Service to block a new INS policy that discourages holders of temporary-worker visas from striking. The U.S. attorney’s office responded by pledging this week that the policy will not be implemented in the Kaiser strike.

- A picketing nurse was shoved by a Kaiser security guard a week ago during nighttime picketing.