by Juliana Birnbaum Fox
Nurses make demands St. Luke’s Hospital, other Sutter’s hospitals and supported by the Nurses Union, hold a labor strike at the corner of César Chávez and Valencia streets. (photos by Marvin J. Ramirez)
About 4,000 nurses at eight Sutter Health hospitals in the Bay area, including St. Luke’s in the Mission District of San Francisco, started striking March 21 over a dispute about health standards at the hospitals, pension benefits, and the closing of hospitals in poor areas.
Planned to last 10 days, the action affects hospitals in Antioch, Berkeley, Burlingame, Castro Valley, Oakland, San Francisco, San Mateo and Vallejo. The California Nurses Association states that the walkout is due to ongoing contract negotiations and Sutter practices that it says puts patients at risk.
“Sutter cannot expect RNs to sit idly by and watch the ongoing problems with patient care and patient safety at our hospitals,” reads the Nurses Association statement. “ When there are not enough nurses, patients are put at risk, period. We don’t want to strike, but our ethical oblication as patient advocates demands it.”
Nurse Francisca Laurel, on strike, don’t want St. Luke’s to be close
Hospital. “They say they“We are fighting for better retirement,” said Francisca Laurel, a medical surgical nurse since 1979 and one of many other nurses protesting an eventual closure of St. Luke’s want to close the hospital…we want to save it.”
Sutter Health said it hasmet the levels of staffing, health care and retirement benefi ts the union has demanded from other hospitals. It said the union’s “real goal is more members and more dues money.”
St. Luke’s Hospital’s status has been in question over the past year and among the plans to reduce costs there are calls for fewer nurses in the neonatal unit, as well as for nurses to be crosstrained outside their areas of specialty.
“This is a change in service … this is a very solid way to do it.” Dr. Martin Brotman, president and CEO of CPMC, the more profitable of the Sutter hospitals in the city, told the SF Chronicle last December. He said a decision on whether to close the hospital would not be made for two years.
All hospitals remain open currently, and hospital officials have said that patient care won’t be disrupted.
