Replacement nurses arrive to prepare for possible strike
Maura Lerner
Star Tribune
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
A small army of replacement nurses has started to arrive for training in the Twin Cities, as a dozen hospitals in the area brace for a probable walkout Friday by more than 7,700 registered nurses.For now, hospital officials are doing their best to keep the incoming nurses out of the public eye. They've scheduled orientation sessions for today and Thursday at secret locations and won't say where the nurses will be housed.
"It's a security thing," said Linda Zespy of the Children's Hospitals of Minneapolis and St. Paul."It's just the way that it's done with replacement nurses," Zespy said.So far, no new talks have been scheduled. But the hospitals called on the Minnesota Nurses Association on Tuesday to let its members vote on the latest contract offer, which the union's negotiators rejected last week."The hospitals have heard from some of their nurses that they would like the opportunity to vote on the proposals," said Shireen Gandhi-Kozel, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Hospital and Healthcare Partnership.She said four of the six negotiating teams, which represent nurses and managers at the 12 hospitals, agreed on staffing, which is one of the thorniest issues.
The main stumbling block was money, she said, with the hospitals offering a 19.1 percent increase over three years and the union seeking a 35 percent increase."We're asking the Minnesota Nurses Association to put the proposals to a vote," she said.But the union said it has heard no such request from its members. "That's the intent of the hospitals, to override the negotiating committee," said Jan Rabbers, the union's spokeswoman. "But what they'll find is that the membership is the one that's driving the demands." On May 17, the nurses voted overwhelmingly to reject the hospitals' contract offers, which included an 18 percent raise over three years. But nurses say staffing levels are a major issue because they're often stretched too thin to care for patients safely.Hospital officials said replacement nurses would need a day or two of training before replacing the striking nurses Friday. They scheduled the sessions off-site, at secret locations, to keep them away from any possible harm.
"I can understand why they wouldn't want to disclose the location and have 10, 20 media people descend on them, as well as picketing going on outside," said Gandhi-Kozel. "The primary focus is to make sure that they receive education, and we need to have a productive environment for that to happen." Hospital officials said that the replacement nurses, hired by agencies that specialize in strike staffing, have a minimum of two years' experience in hospital care and an average of five to 12 years in their specialty areas. "Whether we're talking about physicians or nurses, we have national standards," said Dr. William Goodall, vice president of regional medical affairs at Allina Health System, which owns four of the affected hospitals. "So if you are a degreed and licensed RN, it's highly likely that you're competent to begin with." Thousands of replacement nurses will be arriving, although the hospitals won't say just how many. They will be expected to work 12-hour shifts six days a week, hospital officials said.
In return, they'll get $40 an hour, plus free housing, transportation and other perks.At HealthEast's three hospitals, 340 visiting nurses are expected to replace 1,100 striking nurses, many of whom are part-time. And the two Children's Hospitals expect 300 replacement nurses to help fill in for the 1,200 or so who will go on strike. To help orient them, officials have brought ventilators, IV systems and other hospital equipment to the off-site training location, Zespy said. "It won't be the same; we want our nurses back," she said. "But in the meantime, we'll assure the high-quality, safe care that we're known for."-- Maura Lerner is at [email protected] .
Charles Charles Charles...... look around at the strikes. The nurses in Minnesota did not accept the contracts UNTIL their STAFFING issues were addressed. Most of them ended up with the same pay increases that were offered in the offers that didnt address the staffing issues. They refused that but once the staffing issues were addressed, accepted it. So those contracts were turned down because of STAFFING issues. Most are. The nurses in DC last year rejected their hospitals offer of a high raise & offered to take less of a raise if the hospital would address its pt issues -the hospital said NO. At my hospital, we didnt even want double-digit raises. We wanted safe staffing ratios & restrictions on mandatory ot. The hospital refused to discuss it - until we took a strike vote last Dec. Six days later not only did they discuss it but they agreed to all of it. Once again, negotiations had been stalled over pt issues - until the threat of a strike sounded. Most negotiations are stalmated over STAFFING and PT issues as well as professional practice...NOT money. Just look at Wild's posts on the matter berating us for NOT turning down contracts on the pay issues and chiding us for NOT getting bigger increases from a strike. He laughed at NY nurses who struck over safe staffing ratios & mandatory OT - because they only took a 5% raise per year of a 3 yr contract....BUT they ELIMINATED the practice of mandatory OT and GAINED staffing guidelines, an RN staffing committee & safe staffing ratios. Thats usually the way it is - not the way you thought. However, The economics are important too because if the pay & benefits are not up to par, RNs will not want to work at that facility, unsafe short staffing will persist & that IS a pt issue - and a strike issue. Economics and pt care issues are related so yes money is an issue too. The thing is nurses will accept less of it & put the pt issues before the amount of any raise they get. I have never heard of a strike happening over just one thing. In all of them that I have heard of, the issues are intertwined just like this. I never heard of a strike where all the other pt issues were addressed adqequately but the nurses stayed on strike just to get even higher raises than were offered. If all the other pt care issues are adequately addressed, they take a smaller raise, & accept the contract, recognizing that the hospital will be spending more money on putting all those other improvements into place & once it does, they will able to recruit/retain more staff. And those are the issues they struck for. Having said all that, still, no nurse should have to defend or make excuses for demanding to be paid a salary reflective of her value/responsibility to the facility & its pts.
"Realize that its untrue to say we cant afford to boost nurse salaries or nurse staffing. The truth is, theres money enough to afford the type of healthcare and working conditions for nurses that we all want. As a society, we're choosing to spend that money elsewhere. Nurses need to own the legitimacy of being well-paid and compensated as respected professionals. We need to educate the public about the inequities of nursing salaries. We must stop feeling that we should play nice when it comes to economic issues. Our skills, knowledge, and wisdom are valuable, and they should be compensated as such. The public wont get the point about nursing salaries until nurses themselves get it...." http://community.nursingspectrum.com/MagazineArticles/article.cfm?AID=4098
yes but that was not my intent at all. I was not making a blanket statement about Southern nurses. I was referring to the 300 nurses from the South that the news article was discussing.
first off the site did NOT go underground, it is: www.scab.org, no s on the end of scab. Second of all I live in a free country, and I have the Right..no more like a responsibility to think for myself and chose to strike or work, I chose to work and under no circumstances does that give you the right to deride me or accuse me of undermining you. This is the USA, a democratic nation, not a socialist nation and I have my rights also.
YOU have rights, yes. Do you have the right to eliminate the First Amendment protections of those who criticize you in this USA?
No.
I believe if you had been with me at the failed resucitation attempt on a young man after elective surgery, tried to comfort his wife and children, and helped wrap him in a body bag you might change your opinion.
The hospital had sent a nurse home early for "budgetary reasons". I came to work nights. His nurse found him clammy, moaning, and hypotensive. There were notes that he kept calling for help. The unlicensed person assigned to him did not tell the ONLY RN left on the unit because, "The nurse was so busy and it was too soon for pain medicine."
I would strike to get safer staffing. No family should have this happen! No nurse should have to be forced to work under such dangerous understaffing!
If I want to blame SCABS for helping the hospital avoid negotiating safer staffing with the nurses please do not tell me I cannot speak my opinion. Is it a free country for those who do not agree with you also?
"The adversarial issue does concern me though. What about collaboration?"
What would we be able to collaborate on? This is not a facetious question. I honestly can't drum up an idea as to how striking nurses and scabs can collaborate.
I don't think there is anything wrong with nurses striking for money. Let's face it we can't continue to draw people into this profession and keep them here unless we offer good wages. In order to provide the staffing we need to care for patients we must provide good wages. So I don't think nurses ever strike solely for money (they are considering the impact on patient care if nurses continue to leave the profession or the area in droves).
"The adversarial issue does concern me though. What about collaboration?"
What would we be able to collaborate on? This is not a facetious question. I honestly can't drum up an idea as to how striking nurses and scabs can collaborate.
Actually I was referring to nurses and hospital admin collaborating.
I don't think there is anything wrong with nurses striking for money. Let's face it we can't continue to draw people into this profession and keep them here unless we offer good wages. In order to provide the staffing we need to care for patients we must provide good wages. So I don't think nurses ever strike solely for money (they are considering the impact on patient care if nurses continue to leave the profession or the area in droves).
In some areas of the country it might be very appropriate to address the wage and benefit issue, especially if hospitals truly have monopsony power over employment. With our current low numbers of nurses and the high probability that it will get worse over time, we should look at some additional solutions that will carry us long term, like work to elevate the status of the profession in real terms and economic ones. I see that as the only long term fix on the horizon.
I completely agree Charles. I am in BC, Canada and we lose TONS of nurses to the US every year. The status of the profession is the same in each country, but people go where the money is. That's why I think wages are extremely important and nurses shouldn't accept a contract that doesn't adress this issue.
Charles, one of the things that has come out after the fact, is that last Thursday evening, when the hospital started to look at its' census and the number of strikebreakers it had for the strike beginning at 05:30 AM Friday, it was 98 strikebreakers short! Guess what? The Hospital had to ask the nurse negotiators to come back to the table to bargain again! Just because there weren't enough bodies to fill the slots! If there weren't strikebreakers involved, we could have had this offer several weeks ago, and would have been treated a lot better than we were! That is what makes us so angry about strikebreakers! Maybe if strikebreakers were willing to come and work for the same salary that we are paid, and with the same staffing ratios we have, then I could believe that they care for the patients and not just the money.
As a Southern nurse, I took absolutely no offense to JT's statement. She only commented on the obvious. What I do take offense to is those destroying, for greed, what the nurses in MN are working toward. The poor wages in the south are a big reason we should NOT strike-break. These nurses are running north for temporary gain, whereas if everyone would sit back and allow the nurses with guts to negotiate without interference from scabs, we would all benefit. Also, if I understand correctly, a large portion of those nurses came from Louisiania. The pay there is not severely low compared to the rest of the nation. If you compare cost of living, nor is it low here in Alabama. So, that is no excuse to run North to scab!
Charles, that concerns us too. If the hospital would collaborate with us, we would be ecstatic!
Strikes only happen after months or years of trying to get to a resolution thru negotiating (2 yrs in Worcester,MA & Nyack, NY) & ONLY AFTER the HOSPITAL walks out on negotiations & refuses to collaborate any further with the nurses. It is not the nurses running out the door to take it to the streets. It is the hospital pushing us out the door. 2 contracts ago, we were left dumbstruck at negotiations where we thought we were collaborating well & making headway & the hospital suddenly said "we're finished talking. You have our offer. Thats it". They had this planned because in unison they made a big show of slamming shut their notebooks, getting up & walking out of the room without further discussion. We had not planned to strike & thought we were actually making progress. Surprise surprise, huh?
Well that final offer was totally unacceptable & would have had us agreeing to be laid off when we already were 50 RNs short because the hosptial had frozen vacant positions & refused to recruit, reducing our health benefits AND paying for them, reducing our salaries, diminshing our voice in policy making that would affect our practice, cutting tuition reimbursement, cutting recognition for advanced degrees, among many other things like eliminating preceptorship program (he figured he wasnt going to be hiring RNs so we didnt need preceptors anymore)...esentially knocking us back 30 yrs & removing 30 yrs worth of collective bargaining gains all of which would have made it impossible to recruit and retain ANY staff. And what would happen to the pts then??? We had no choice. We feel our hospital is ours & we felt he was killing it. We couldnt let him do that. If you cant accept the contract & the hospital will negotiate no further, you MUST strike to protest & get them back to the table.
So thats what we did. We were forced to - as usual - But only after the hospital refused to collaborate with us anymore. This new CEO from Georgia said "theres the door, ladies" . We handed in the 10 day notice & the only provision the hospital made for our strike was to hire a scab agency. (Thats a regional vernacular). On day 7 of that notice, with 3 days left to go before the strike, the State informed the hospital it was barring those strike-breakers from coming to work because the agency did not have a license to work in NY! The hospital didnt even know the agency it hired to care for our pts was unlicensed here. That tells you how concerned our hospital was for the welfare of our pts.
So there they were, 3 days to a strike & no replacements & no other plans to care for the pts. They tried at that point to get the other hospitals in the area to send NM & other nurses administrators to step in but those people refused & their own employers couldnt force them. The CEO had IMPLEMENTED his final offer anyway - even before the strike began - & made all those changes himself. The NLRB found the hospital guilty of a ton of labor law violations, unfair labor practices, & they were going to be heavily fined for illegally provoking a strike. (in many of the nation's RN strikes, this is found to be true too).
The CEO was unfazed by all this.
So the board of directors took over negotiations, frantically called our union to come back to negotiations because they had no one to take care of the pts. We agreed, called off the strike 2 days before it was supposed to start & they put back everything the CEO took away.
Recognizing that the hospital did have some financial difficulties at the time, we once again tried to collaborate with them & WE OFFERED to SUSPEND our yearly raises for the length of the contract if they would just address the staffing & pt care issues. That means that 600plus RNs would be GIVING the hospital $2700.oo EACH in an effort to work together with the adminsitration to pull the hospital out of its difficulties.... with the stipulation that one month before the contract ended, we all would jump up to the salary we were supposed to be at if we hadnt made that gift. Id say we did our part at collaboration.
The board agreed with that offer. We signed a "concession" contract - meaning we did not make significant gains but the top issues were adequately dealt with & we could live with it until the hospital was back on its feet. (more collaboration on our part) & there was no strike - all because there were no "replacements" available. Had the agnecy had a NY license, the hospital would have sat back & let the strike happen.
As it was, 2 months later the CEO was "allowed to resign" - 2 yrs ahead of his contract expiration date. But HIS contract was fully paid out. HE didnt have to make any monetary gift to rectify the disaster he caused.
It would be wonderful if they would collaborate - believe me we try very hard -but what we seem to get is a few months of slow progress & then a temper tantrum followed by "Take it or Leave it". So how do we get these businessmen to collaborate??? If the contract doesnt do anything to improve issues that are affecting pt care we have to leave it until they come to their senses & figure out another way & are more collaborative with us.
I'll never understand why administrators have to chose the route of a strike. Why cant they just collaborate, be professional & compromise - settle from the beginning - instead of trying to be the master with the whip? Is that anyway to treat professionals? Force us out the door with their adversarial tactics & then tell us that WE are "unprofessional" for going out??
-jt
2,709 Posts
Charles Charles Charles...... look around at the strikes. The nurses in Minnesota did not accept the contracts UNTIL their STAFFING issues were addressed. Most of them ended up with the same pay increases that were offered in the offers that didnt address the staffing issues. They refused that but once the staffing issues were addressed, accepted it. So those contracts were turned down because of STAFFING issues. Most are. The nurses in DC last year rejected their hospitals offer of a high raise & offered to take less of a raise if the hospital would address its pt issues -the hospital said NO. At my hospital, we didnt even want double-digit raises. We wanted safe staffing ratios & restrictions on mandatory ot. The hospital refused to discuss it - until we took a strike vote last Dec. Six days later not only did they discuss it but they agreed to all of it. Once again, negotiations had been stalled over pt issues - until the threat of a strike sounded. Most negotiations are stalmated over STAFFING and PT issues as well as professional practice...NOT money. Just look at Wild's posts on the matter berating us for NOT turning down contracts on the pay issues and chiding us for NOT getting bigger increases from a strike. He laughed at NY nurses who struck over safe staffing ratios & mandatory OT - because they only took a 5% raise per year of a 3 yr contract....BUT they ELIMINATED the practice of mandatory OT and GAINED staffing guidelines, an RN staffing committee & safe staffing ratios. Thats usually the way it is - not the way you thought. However, The economics are important too because if the pay & benefits are not up to par, RNs will not want to work at that facility, unsafe short staffing will persist & that IS a pt issue - and a strike issue. Economics and pt care issues are related so yes money is an issue too. The thing is nurses will accept less of it & put the pt issues before the amount of any raise they get. I have never heard of a strike happening over just one thing. In all of them that I have heard of, the issues are intertwined just like this. I never heard of a strike where all the other pt issues were addressed adqequately but the nurses stayed on strike just to get even higher raises than were offered. If all the other pt care issues are adequately addressed, they take a smaller raise, & accept the contract, recognizing that the hospital will be spending more money on putting all those other improvements into place & once it does, they will able to recruit/retain more staff. And those are the issues they struck for. Having said all that, still, no nurse should have to defend or make excuses for demanding to be paid a salary reflective of her value/responsibility to the facility & its pts.
"Realize that its untrue to say we cant afford to boost nurse salaries or nurse staffing. The truth is, theres money enough to afford the type of healthcare and working conditions for nurses that we all want. As a society, we're choosing to spend that money elsewhere. Nurses need to own the legitimacy of being well-paid and compensated as respected professionals. We need to educate the public about the inequities of nursing salaries. We must stop feeling that we should play nice when it comes to economic issues. Our skills, knowledge, and wisdom are valuable, and they should be compensated as such. The public wont get the point about nursing salaries until nurses themselves get it...." http://community.nursingspectrum.com/MagazineArticles/article.cfm?AID=4098