Nurses at Scripps Encinitas voted this week to keep the California Nurses Association as their union representative. The opponents had tried to launch a decertification effort to eliminate CNA but, according to the hospital's anti-union website, CNA won the vote.
So much for all of the predictions that union decertifications will be sweeping the state of California.
While the vote was close, it's not surprizing that a majority of RN's ultimately felt they'd still do better with the union, despite all the controversy with no contract, strikes, etc.
IMHO, I think the hospital made a mistake by enlisting doctors, non-nurses and anti-union nurses from other hospitals to campaign against the union. You risk offending RN's when people who don't do the job, or people who don't even work there, to try to tell you how to vote on your particular job situation. In my opinion, it probably cost the hospital the election.
Anyway ... just thought everybody would like to know the latest news since decertification has been a hot topic in this forum.
By: California Nurses Association, Scripps Encinitas
North County Times
August 18, 2005
Over the past few months, Scripps Encinitas Hospital has spent more than $1 million on an anti-union campaign against its own registered nurses.
The results are in, and the registered nurses of Scripps have rejected this attack. It's time for Scripps to return to the bargaining table and get serious about providing patients with the best possible care.
The nearly 260 registered nurses at Scripps Encinitas voted in December 2003 to become members of the California Nurses Association (CNA). We did so to win a stronger voice for improving patient care and to gain salaries and benefits that would attract and retain the most qualified nurses and end Scripps' high turnover rates.
Unfortunately, rather than address these problems, Scripps Encinitas hired anti-unionconsultants to agitate at the hospital against the nurses assocation and its nurse leaders. The hospital and its consultants sparked a "decertification" campaign, dressing it up as a "grass-roots" effort to split registered nurses off from their union. Just as Scripps overwhelmingly lost the first unionization vote, they lost this vote, too.
Scripps wasted crucial resources on their campaign against the nurses assocation. They hired strike replacement staff, bought T-shirts and balloons, threw parties, held rallies and ate up the time of caregivers with anti-union meetings. A conservative estimate for their campaign, including legal and consulting fees, begins at $1.3 million. This is money that should have been spent on patient care and recruiting and retaining nurses; instead it is lost forever.
The California Hospital Association, a lobbying group of which Scripps is a prominent member, has a statewide strategy of encouraging hospitals to stonewall negotiations and undercut nurses' rights to organize. Nurses have faced nearly identical, pseudo-grass-roots efforts around the state ---- cynical attempts to safeguard corporate profits no matter the cost to patient care or worker morale.
These actions parallel the hospital association's efforts to reverse a ground-breaking patient safety law, sponsored by the California Nurses Association, that guarantees a safe number of registered nurses per patient, and their heated opposition to a long list of other reforms intended to protect patients and consumers.
But registered nurses realize that when we are unified, we can stand up to health care corporations and improve patient care. That is why nurses from Inland Valley Medical Center and Tri-City Medical Center were cheering us on during the Scripps Encinitas election. Nurses at Inland Valley are now attempting to bargain a first CNA contract, while Tri-City nurses are organizing to gain majority support status for CNA representation ---- just the latest examples of nurses from across the state fighting to join the nurses association.
The nurses have spoken. The community, too, has spoken as teachers, legislators, firefighters, patients, and registered nurses from neighboring hospitals turned out at rallies in support of Scripps registered nurses.
It's time for Scripps to respect our decision for collective representation, and work with us and our union to negotiate a fair contract to end the high turnover rates among caregivers and to improve patient care in our community.
---- Signed, the California Nurses Association Bargaining Team at Scripps Encinitas Hospital
Thank you for validating what I said. Just because you think that you can handle you own personal bargaining, that fact is that the hospitals have hard nose MALE negotiatiers, who can run rings around any amateur, which you are. If nurses were able negotiate better wages and working conditions, we would all be making a million bucks and working utopia, whic we are not.
Delusions of grandeur will not solve the crisis in nursing. Only hard line negitating by professional union people will turn the tide. I agree, that not all unions do what they should. Washington State Nurses Association is a prime example of that, and the reason that the nurses here in Spokane, dropped out of WSNA like it was the plague after their last excuse for a contract. The nurse got a 5% raise but had to agree to increase the cost of their already overpriced medical benefits by 20 %, and the hospital refused to give them retroactive pay for the three months after the contract expired. As the nurse went to vote on the contract, they put in the paperwork to get out of WSNA. Now that is a union that is about as useful, as we say in Brooklyn, as tits on a bull.
Lindarn, RN, BSN, CCRN
Spokane, Washington
Well here at Long Beach Memorial, CNA negotiated a horrible contract for us.
We lost 4 hours of educational leave. before CNA we could be paid out for educational leave if we didn't use it, and now 8 of our hours must be used for mandatory skills training by the hospital. After CNA negotiated our contract RNs now pay more for medical benefits than non union employees. AND CNA failed to negotiate dues check off so even part time people have to pay 2.2% of their gross pay.(and have to remember to mail it. If you are late they can charge a late fee) The other thing is that CNA agreed to a 90 day delay in pay raises so the hospital could try to recuperate some of the millions lost during the 2 strikes. We will never be able to get the money back we lost in the strikes.
These are just a few reasons (specifics) why I don't like CNA.
I also don't like this Labor Party thing that they are dues paying members of. If you are a member of CNA you also pay dues to the Labor Party which is totally socialist. I don't happen to be socialist, nor do I agree with many of their ideas.You can check them out at http://www.thelaborparty.org, you will find CNA listed as dues paying member.
Well here at Long Beach Memorial, CNA negotiated a horrible contract for us.
We lost 4 hours of educational leave. before CNA we could be paid out for educational leave if we didn't use it, and now 8 of our hours must be used for mandatory skills training by the hospital. After CNA negotiated our contract RNs now pay more for medical benefits than non union employees. AND CNA failed to negotiate dues check off so even part time people have to pay 2.2% of their gross pay.(and have to remember to mail it. If you are late they can charge a late fee) The other thing is that CNA agreed to a 90 day delay in pay raises so the hospital could try to recuperate some of the millions lost during the 2 strikes. We will never be able to get the money back we lost in the strikes.
These are just a few reasons (specifics) why I don't like CNA.
I also don't like this Labor Party thing that they are dues paying members of. If you are a member of CNA you also pay dues to the Labor Party which is totally socialist. I don't happen to be socialist, nor do I agree with many of their ideas.You can check them out at http://www.thelaborparty.org, you will find CNA listed as dues paying member.
I have to ask, who were the nurses on the negotiating team? I worked at Long Beach Memorial from 1980 to 1989, and I was involved in the union organizing back then. We were disgusted with the apathy of the nurses at Long Beach Memorial and their acceptance of the changes in our working conditions and the 12 hour shifts. I have spoken to some of my friends there, and in the face of the horrible changed in health care and treatment of nurses, there were still so many nurses who were against unionizing and taking control of their nursing practice at the hospital. If the nurses there were as uninvolved and passive now as they were then, I am not surprised that your contract was less than desirable, and the hosptal got what IT wanted in the contract. My friends have said that they could not believe how difficult itwas to get the hospital organized. The working conditions were terrible, everyon was so unhappy, and they were losing new grads left and right.
The union is the nurses, and if the nurses choose to not get involved, and participate in the contract negotiations, inform the committe what they want and do not want, and stand together, than a rotten contract is what they will get. The hospital undoubtedly saw the ambivalence in the nurses and used it, once again, to their advantage. This is what they did 20 years ago when we tried to unionize with UNAC, and they went with what worked. The nurses agreed to this contract. Live and learn.
By the way, I worked in Medical -Respiratory ICU when it was on 7 East and the CCU was also on 7 East. We had Richard Nixon as a patient in the CCU there after he resigned the Presidency after Watergate. This was before the units actually opened up on the 6th and 7th floors. There are still nurses there who took care of him then. The6th and 7th floors were added on to the original hospital structure several years after the original building was built. I know that I am dating myself. Sorry
I have to ask, who were the nurses on the negotiating team? I worked at Long Beach Memorial from 1980 to 1989, and I was involved in the union organizing back then. We were disgusted with the apathy of the nurses at Long Beach Memorial and their acceptance of the changes in our working conditions and the 12 hour shifts. I have spoken to some of my friends there, and in the face of the horrible changed in health care and treatment of nurses, there were still so many nurses who were against unionizing and taking control of their nursing practice at the hospital. If the nurses there were as uninvolved and passive now as they were then, I am not surprised that your contract was less than desirable, and the hosptal got what IT wanted in the contract. My friends have said that they could not believe how difficult itwas to get the hospital organized. The working conditions were terrible, everyon was so unhappy, and they were losing new grads left and right.
The union is the nurses, and if the nurses choose to not get involved, and participate in the contract negotiations, inform the committe what they want and do not want, and stand together, than a rotten contract is what they will get. The hospital undoubtedly saw the ambivalence in the nurses and used it, once again, to their advantage. This is what they did 20 years ago when we tried to unionize with UNAC, and they went with what worked. The nurses agreed to this contract. Live and learn.
By the way, I worked in Medical -Respiratory ICU when it was on 7 East and the CCU was also on 7 East. We had Richard Nixon as a patient in the CCU there after he resigned the Presidency after Watergate. This was before the units actually opened up on the 6th and 7th floors. There are still nurses there who took care of him then. The6th and 7th floors were added on to the original hospital structure several years after the original building was built. I know that I am dating myself. Sorry
Lindarn, RN, BSN, CCRN
Spokane, Washington
Isn't it a violation of HIPPA to talk about who your patients are/were on a public forum such as this?
Everyone was not miserable before CNA, but I'm sure that is your perspective.
Diane Hirsch-Garcia LVN was the lead negotiator at LBM for their contract. She is quoted as saying it's a great contract.
///Nixon's most memorable Long Beach visits were to Memorial Medical Center. His first physical after being elected president was in January 1969, when he came to the Linden Avenue offices of his longtime friend and physician Dr. John C. Lungren, who was about to become chief of Memorial's medical staff. In September 1974, the then-besieged president returned to Memorial for treatment for vein inflammation and blood clot formation. Nixon was at Memorial on Oct. 1, 1974, the day the Watergate trial began. Lungren told reporters that day that Nixon's condition would make him unable to go to Washington, D.C. to testify in the cover-up trial for at least a few weeks and that the taking of a deposition in his hospital room would be out of the question.
///Nixon's most memorable Long Beach visits were to Memorial Medical Center. His first physical after being elected president was in January 1969, when he came to the Linden Avenue offices of his longtime friend and physician Dr. John C. Lungren, who was about to become chief of Memorial's medical staff. In September 1974, the then-besieged president returned to Memorial for treatment for vein inflammation and blood clot formation. Nixon was at Memorial on Oct. 1, 1974, the day the Watergate trial began. Lungren told reporters that day that Nixon's condition would make him unable to go to Washington, D.C. to testify in the cover-up trial for at least a few weeks and that the taking of a deposition in his hospital room would be out of the question.
If I were hospitalized and chose to put out a press release stating that I had been hospitalized, that is my right. If I am hospitalized and put out a press release and then you as my nurses then give an interview regarding my hospitalization, you are still in violation of HIPPA. I can release that information, my caregivers may NOT without my written permission! I think some posters here need a refresher on HIPPA
Well here at Long Beach Memorial, CNA negotiated a horrible contract for us.
We lost 4 hours of educational leave. before CNA we could be paid out for educational leave if we didn't use it, and now 8 of our hours must be used for mandatory skills training by the hospital. After CNA negotiated our contract RNs now pay more for medical benefits than non union employees. AND CNA failed to negotiate dues check off so even part time people have to pay 2.2% of their gross pay.(and have to remember to mail it. If you are late they can charge a late fee) The other thing is that CNA agreed to a 90 day delay in pay raises so the hospital could try to recuperate some of the millions lost during the 2 strikes. We will never be able to get the money back we lost in the strikes.
These are just a few reasons (specifics) why I don't like CNA.
I also don't like this Labor Party thing that they are dues paying members of. If you are a member of CNA you also pay dues to the Labor Party which is totally socialist. I don't happen to be socialist, nor do I agree with many of their ideas.You can check them out at http://www.thelaborparty.org, you will find CNA listed as dues paying member.
Did you actually participate in the walkout? If not, you wouldn't have lost any money at all and would have only benefitted from the payraise CNA negotiated. Many nicu nurses didn't participate in the walkout from what I was told.
I don't understand how you can say there were no gains in the contract when wages and pension contributions and incentive pay were all increased. That's not even talking about working conditions that were improved (like mandatory OT being eliminated). That was a real issue in the nicu for years. Maybe LBM nurses are under a different contract than MCH? The gains at MCH seem obvious to me. I wound up taking a job in the system, but I don't know if the contracts are all the same or not between Anaheim, Saddleback, MCH, LBM, etc.
Did you actually participate in the walkout? If not, you wouldn't have lost any money at all and would have only benefitted from the payraise CNA negotiated. Many nicu nurses didn't participate in the walkout from what I was told.
I don't understand how you can say there were no gains in the contract when wages and pension contributions and incentive pay were all increased. That's not even talking about working conditions that were improved (like mandatory OT being eliminated). That was a real issue in the nicu for years. Maybe LBM nurses are under a different contract than MCH? The gains at MCH seem obvious to me. I wound up taking a job in the system, but I don't know if the contracts are all the same or not between Anaheim, Saddleback, MCH, LBM, etc.
Well Saddleback is not union, and I'm not sure about Anaheim. LBM and MCH were negotiated at different times they do not share a contract.
I did not say there were no gains, but what I did say is the union gave away some benefits that I liked. That's how negotiations work some gains, some losses. It's impossible to know before negotiations start what will be lost and what will be gained. CNA told us we could not lose anything by negotiating a contract. They said we would keep all of our current benefits (at that time) and gain improved wages and a "pension plan" with them negotiating for us. THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED!!
WE LOST but CNA gained a lot of dues money. We are behind market in our area for RN wages. CNA did not keep many of the promises it made when courting us!
SmilingBluEyes
20,964 Posts
I agree; stereotyping brings ZERO to the debate. Please refrain from blanket-statement stereotyping by gender, locale, political affiliation.