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Health Care Workers Strike at 18 Hospitals, Demand Increases in Pay

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Thousands of health care employees who say they are so overworked that patient care suffers walked off the job at 18 hospitals across the state Thursday to press demands for higher pay and increased staffing.

Employees at 16 hospitals in the Bay Area and two in Ventura County who are members of the Service Employees International Union struck at dawn waving signs and calling on management to add more nurses and support staff.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Dec. 16, 2000 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday December 16, 2000 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 4 Metro Desk 1 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Strike participants--A story in Friday’s Times said nurses were on strike at 16 Bay Area hospitals. The striking employees were not nurses but respiratory therapists, nursing assistants and housekeepers.

The Bay Area strike was a 24-hour walkout, but the strikes at hospitals owned by Catholic Healthcare West in Oxnard and Camarillo are scheduled to continue for two weeks.

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About 100 nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard massed on the corner of Gonzales Road and Rose Avenue under heavy clouds.

Hospital administrators said the strike in Ventura County had not disrupted operations. At St. John’s, replacement nurses filled in for strikers, three surgeries were done and the emergency and intensive care units were fully staffed, hospital officials said. The outpatient surgery center, however, was closed.

“We are completely staffed,” said Administrator Charles Padilla.

Management flew in about 150 nurses from Denver-based U.S. Nursing Corp. and is paying them between $35 and $50 an hour to fill in for strikers.

Padilla said the administration is ready to resume negotiations Monday with Local 399 of the union, which represents the nurses. The strike’s greatest effect could be on the hospitals’ bottom line, Padilla said.

The strike could cost St. John’s in Oxnard and its sister hospital, St. John’s Pleasant Valley in Camarillo, as much as $1 million in extra labor costs, he said.

The hospital has offered the nurses raises of as much as 11%, which would bring their pay to about $18.50 per hour for inexperienced nurses and $29 for veterans. But union leaders are focusing on staffing levels, saying nurses are spread so thin that patient care is endangered.

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Padilla said there is a national nursing shortage and St. John’s is not immune. Sometimes nurses are overwhelmed by patients and other times they aren’t, he said.

“I think the staffing is very appropriate. It looks to me that they are hellbent on striking,” he said. “At first they said it was all about money and now it’s about staffing. It’s a moving target.”

Striking nurses say the hospital has never talked seriously about increasing the ratio of patients assigned to each nurse. Many said they had sometimes seen patients waiting hours to see nurses. Some said they were given 10 patients per shift, a level that nurses say is excessive.

“We want to have a say on how the units are staffed,” said Janet Brown, a nurse who is part of the union’s negotiating committee. “They fear losing some power over us.”

Stephanie Lara-Jenkins, an emergency room nurse in Oxnard, said she can’t believe the situation has spiraled into a strike.

“I know they have the money,” she said of the hospital. “I can’t imagine how stupid they would be not to settle this.”

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Catholic Healthcare West also owns three hospitals in the Bay Area where nurses went on strike. Nine are owned by Sutter Health, two by Tenet Healthcare Corp. and two by Prison Health Services.

Workers in those hospitals have held a series of 24-hour strikes since July. About 6,000 nurses, respiratory therapists, nursing assistants and housekeepers joined the walkout Thursday.

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Times staff writer John Glionna and correspondent Gail Davis contributed to this story.

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