Tentative Pact Would Give Nurses 4% Raises

Aided by a countywide nursing shortage and a bidding war among hospitals to retain staff, nurses at Ventura County Medical Center have reached a tentative labor pact that gives them a 4% raise--with a promise that more is coming, a union representative said Monday.

The 250 nurses and psychiatric technicians in the bargaining unit had initially asked for a 10% annual increase, said Martina Melero, a union representative for the California Nurses Assn.

However, nurses are satisfied that the 4% boost is just the first step to even higher wages this fall when another round of negotiations will begin, said Melero, a public-health nurse for the county.

“We deserve 10%, but this is a down payment,” she said. “Those are the county’s words.”

County hospital Administrator Sam Edwards said he would not comment on the settlement until it was ratified, a move expected Thursday.

Supervisor John Flynn said the money is well deserved.

“The nurses are really working hard,” said Flynn, a longtime supporter of unionized workers. “I’m in support of giving them more.”

The agreement comes amid escalating competition for nurses among the county’s eight general hospitals. Last month, St. John’s Regional Medical Center announced it would give its critical-care nurses a 24% pay increase. Pay hikes were needed to keep existing staff and to attract new nurses, the hospital’s administrators said.

Fearful that the medical center in Oxnard would steal nurses away, Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura responded with its own wage hikes. Now, county government is set to boost the pay of its nurses in an agreement that took two months to negotiate and was reached late last week, Melero said.

County officials have agreed to conduct a survey of pay and benefits at public and private hospitals in Southern California to determine average wages, Melero said. County nurses believe the survey will document that they remain underpaid even with their latest increase, she said.

Depending on experience and seniority, county nurses would earn between $19 and $24 an hour after the pay raise, Melero said. If ratified, the increase would be effective next month.

Skilled nurses at St. John’s Regional, by contrast, earn an average of $26 per hour after their March raise. Melero said she knows one nurse who recently left the county to work for St. John’s Regional.

“With our current salary, we can’t get good, experienced nurses. They laugh in our face,” she said.

The tentative agreement also gives county nurses a 50% increase in pay for the periods when they are on call for duty, Melero said. Nurses currently receive straight time when called in to work on days off, but that would rise to time-and-a-half under the pact, she said.

The county nurses are in the midst of a two-year contract that expires in September. But a provision in the current pact allowed renegotiation of pay scales as early as last fall.

Nurses conducted an assertive campaign, picketing the county hospital three times and taking their plea to the Board of Supervisors.

Although nurses generally are pleased with the current proposal, there is “still much more work to be done,” Melero said. Nurses protest the county’s use of contract nurses to fill in as needed and allege unsafe staffing practices, such as having intensive-care nurses work in the pediatric unit without training.

Labor talks with other county employee groups are continuing. The county is still negotiating with the unions that represent probation officers and prosecutors, Flynn said.

A pact with firefighters was recently approved that boosted salaries by 5% this year and 3% annually for the next four years.

Although the expiration dates of contracts are staggered, some labor groups have been bargaining for more than two years, Flynn said.