Nurses at 2 Hospitals to Vote on Whether to Join Labor Union

Concerned about pay and patient care, nurses at two financially troubled Ventura County hospitals will decide today whether they want to join a labor union as part of a growing nationwide response to the cost cutting of HMOs.

About 530 registered nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, the county’s largest hospital, and its sister, St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo, are set to vote today between 6 a.m. and 8:30 p.m.

Ballots will be counted immediately by National Labor Relations Board officials, and the results are expected before midnight, officials said.

“The main issue is that we’re working our hearts out. And management says, ‘We need more, we want more,’ ” said Nancy Daw, a St. John’s nurse for 33 years. “You can only be pushed so far, and then we say we won’t take it any more. That’s what happened here.”

Nurses say they must unionize to have any real control over how care is provided for patients. They complain of short staffing, transfers to duties for which they are not trained, pay discrepancies among nurses and the potential for layoffs.

The position of St. John’s, however, is that a union is not needed.

“We’ve told our nurses that we respect their right to have a choice in this election,” said Charles Padilla, administrator of St. John’s in Oxnard. “But we’ve also told them that we think we can do a better job than [the union] in addressing the concerns and frustrations that nurses have not only here, but throughout health care.

“The issues that keep coming up are not enough nurses and not enough money,” he added. “And a union can’t solve either of those problems.”

St. John’s nurses called for a union vote in November after a “substantial majority” signed cards pledging to vote for a union, labor officials said.

Support has been growing since March when the hospital announced a $5-an-hour pay increase for critical-care nurses, angering the majority of nurses who did not get the raise.

Then, in November, the Oxnard medical center’s head of nursing resigned amid speculation that her job duties were being reassigned and that she had opposed any potential nursing cuts.

Padilla said that no cuts are planned for the nursing staff--that the hospital is hiring to fill vacancies--and that he has attempted to address nurses’ other concerns.

*

The hospital has given noncritical-care nurses a 2% increase on top of a scheduled 3% raise as recognition that pay parity is important, said Padilla, who was brought in in July by the hospital’s owner, Catholic Health Care West.

While recent events have heightened concerns, the discontent of St. John’s nurses and health professionals nationwide built during the 1990s in response to payment cuts by managed-care insurance groups to slow spiraling health costs.

The American Medical Assn. in June moved toward forming a labor union to give physicians more leverage in dealing with health maintenance organizations. In Los Angeles, county doctors voted to unionize last year.

The Service Employees International Union, which is organizing St. John’s nurses, is spending $1 million to recruit doctors, and now has 20,000 physician members.

As HMOs have come to dominate the industry, they have reduced payments to hospitals, which have struggled to stay afloat by cutting jobs and services.

Both St. John’s hospitals have been losing money on operations for at least a year and a half, but expect to begin to break even by mid-2000, Padilla said.

Most of Ventura County’s eight general hospitals are losing money, state records show.

“Many nurses feel that health care is no longer driven by compassion for patients but by the bottom line,” said Lisa Hubbard, spokeswoman for the union in Los Angeles. “More and more registered nurses are forming unions across California and the nation.”

Employees at 22 of Catholic Health Care West’s 46 hospitals in California have already unionized, Hubbard said.

And elections are set for 14 more--including the two St. John’s--by the end of March, she said.

*

Although traditionally independent, more nurses have joined unions in the last five years in the United States than joined in the previous 15 years, union officials said. About 18% of the nation’s registered nurses are union members, Hubbard said.

“During the 16 years I’ve been in nursing, I’ve watched a deterioration in the attitude toward nursing, and less and less focus on patient care,” said Catherine Sims, a nurse in the mother-infant unit in Oxnard. “It feels like it’s more about dollars and cents than about humanity. That’s the way hospitals are being run, not just St. John’s, but across the United States. It’s just a business.”

St. John’s nurses said they are also concerned about unequal pay. Not only do critical-care nurses receive an extra $5 an hour, but newly hired nurses sometimes make as much as those who have been at the hospital for many years, said Barbara Lewis, union organizing coordinator

“There’s no recognition of seniority,” she said.

Padilla said higher rates were paid to only a couple of nurses some time ago, but that when the inequities were discovered, the wages of longtime nurses were adjusted upward. Seniority benefits include a bigger company match in pension plans, he said.

“There are a lot of things we do to recognize people’s time with us,” he said.

Lewis acknowledged that the disparity could have been prompted by recruitment problems caused by a nationwide nursing shortage.

But that shortage was prompted by forces beyond the control of nurses, she said. After hospitals laid off nurses in the early 1990s to save money, many nurses retired, took jobs with HMOs or moved into caring for patients at their homes. Colleges also began training fewer nurses.

*

Lewis said the pay issue resonates at St. John’s partly because nurses there make somewhat less than their unionized counterparts at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks. Nationwide, union nurses are paid 15% more than nurses at nonunion hospitals, she said. Locally, nurses are unionized only at Los Robles and Ventura County Medical Center.

Padilla said he didn’t know Los Robles’ pay rates, but cited those at Queen of Angels Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he said the new union contract for registered nurses pays from $17.51 to $26.26 an hour.

By comparison, St. John’s pays $17.66 to $27.20 an hour, he said.

If most St. John’s nurses decide to form a union today, they can begin the collective bargaining process immediately, Hubbard said. That would include electing nurse representatives to write contract proposals. Bargaining team nurses could also begin discussing issues with management.

Sims, who has worked a phone bank seeking support, said she is convinced that the union will win.

“The response has been very enthusiastic,” she said. “There is going to be cause for celebration.”