Nurses From St. John’s Ready to Join Strike Today

With contract negotiations stalled, hundreds of local nurses plan to join a rare statewide health-care strike today, demanding the increased staffing they insist is critical for patient safety and care.

Registered nurses from St. John’s hospitals in Oxnard and Camarillo expect to be on the picket lines at 6 a.m. after failing late Wednesday to reach a deal with management.

And in Northern California, thousands of health-care workers from 16 hospitals had scheduled a 24-hour strike, contending low staffing has created dangerous workloads.

Both nurses and hospital administrators accuse the other of stalling and negotiating in bad faith.

“We pray that this reckless strike action will end soon so our nurses can return to work,” said Armando Azarloza, a spokesman for Catholic Healthcare West, which owns St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard and St. John’s Pleasant Valley in Camarillo, as well as three hospitals facing picket lines in the San Francisco area.

But nurses say it is the hospitals that are being reckless by saddling them with so many patients.

“This is a demonstration across California to say patient care is deteriorating and unless something is done it will only get worse,” said Lisa Hubbard, a spokesman for the Service Employee International Union, which represents the 530 registered nurses at the two area St. John’s hospitals.

Azarloza said the hospitals were bringing in nonunion nurses from the outside to fill in for striking employees. He also said minor surgical cases would be evaluated to determine whether they could be delayed until the strike ends.

About 6,000 workers are expected to be on strike throughout the state today.

In Ventura County, most picketers will be registered nurses while those in the Bay Area are mostly medical support staff, such as respiratory therapists, radiology technicians and licensed vocational nurses.

Nurses and their union representatives have been meeting with St. John’s management for several weeks. On Nov. 29, after making little headway on staffing issues, the union gave the hospital notice that it planned to strike. But talks continued.

Chris Slane, a St. John’s Pleasant Valley nurse and a member of the negotiating team, said hospital administrators have not budged on the issue of staffing.

“We will continue to make ourselves available to them if they want to talk,” he said. Yet administrators don’t think the union is interested in seeking resolution.

“We don’t think they want to end this,” Azarloza said. “This isn’t about St. John’s, this is about big labor trying to organize health-care workers.”

Dozens of nurses from U.S. Nurses Corp., a Denver-based organization that provides trained nurses in the event of strikes, have been flown in and will begin work today.

Aside from strikes at the five Catholic Healthcare West hospitals in Ventura and the Bay Area, workers at nine hospitals owned by Sutter Health, two owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp. and two jail hospitals run by Prison Health Services in and around San Francisco will be off the job today.

Union representatives in the Bay Area expect thousands of strikers to picket at the hospitals and later to join a mass march from the University of California at Berkeley to Sutter Health’s Alta Bates Medical Center nearby.

Workers at those hospitals have staged a series of one-day strikes since July, stemming from their desire and management’s refusal to give them a bigger say in staffing decisions.

In Ventura County, the hospitals initially offered nurses a $1.2-million raise and increased that to $1.4 million a few weeks ago, which would pay nurses from $18.50 per hour for inexperienced nurses to more than $29 per hour for veterans. But nurses say the outstanding issue remains staffing levels.

Patient care and safety are being compromised because so few nurses are available for patients, they maintain.

“I can’t afford to go on strike but I’m prepared to,” said Jeri Bell, a nurse at St. John’s in Oxnard. “You run around all day putting out fires and spend the night wondering if you forgot anything.”