City of Hope’s Hospital Replaces 51 Striking Nurses

The City of Hope’s dispute with its registered nurses union grew uglier this week as the hospital permanently replaced 51 striking nurses.

Some 20-year veterans at the internationally known cancer hospital in Duarte were replaced by nurses just out of college, City of Hope officials acknowledged.

About 80% of the hospital’s 430 nurses went on strike June 15 over contract disputes over time off and job descriptions. By the following week, nurses began returning to work as word got out that they would be replaced permanently.

Meanwhile, hospital officials had begun hiring permanent replacements for nurses who remained on strike. All 51 new nurses--as well as most striking nurses--were on the job this week, working without a contract. Contract negotiations are continuing.

“It was not our intent to replace nurses in sort of a punitive fashion,” said hospital spokeswoman Heather Hand-Ruger. “We were just ensuring we had adequate staffing levels to maintain the level of patient care.”

There is no immediate plan to rehire nurses who were replaced, Hand-Ruger said, but they are on a preferential hiring list and will be called back as openings arise.

But union leaders say they don’t believe the workers will ever get their jobs back.

Representatives of the California Nurses Assn., which represents City of Hope nurses, said hospital managers hired replacements to force the union to back down.

“They’re punishing the nurses who were on the picket line by replacing them,” said nurse Kathy Patane, a union leader who was not replaced.

Pediatrics nurse Carol Beecher-Hoban found out that she was being replaced June 28, her six-year employment anniversary. Beecher-Hoban, 39, a single mother of two young children, scrambled to find part-time nursing jobs, but still must sell her Chino home to make ends meet.

“This whole thing is destroying my whole life,” Beecher-Hoban said. But she does not regret her decision to strike. “I still believe what we went on strike for,” she said.

The nurses strike, the first in the hospital’s 80-year history, turned confrontational quickly. On the first day, about 250 chanting, placard-waving nurses picketed in front of the hospital’s picturesque rose garden. On June 17, the hospital won a court order that restricted picketing.

After the strike began, hospital officials said they began filling open positions, one by one. Some striking nurses returned to their jobs before replacements could be hired, while others found that their jobs already had been filled.

The hospital hired replacements as legislation is pending in the U.S. Senate that would bar businesses from permanently replacing striking workers. The House of Representatives passed the legislation June 16, bringing national attention to the strike.

Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), chairman of the House subcommittee on labor-management relations, issued a statement criticizing the hospital for being “willing to cast aside experienced, long-term employees as soon as they exercise their right to strike.”

The executive board of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor gave tentative approval to a policy that would ban unions from raising money for City of Hope.