Union’s Picket Preparation

ACTION ALERT:

SIGN AND RETURN THIS PICKET PLEDGE! 
Our coworkers, our community, and our contract are worth fighting for.

We finally got responses from management on economics, staffing, safety, and call. After six sessions, hundreds of nurses signing a safety petitions, and dozens of observers coming and sharing their stories with management, we hoped they would come to the table with proposals that reflected our value to St. Joe’s. Instead, we received a clear message: management thinks we're just not worth working to retain.

Economic Responses: 3% and some change...

Our wage proposal works to equitably treat new nurses and retain our experienced nurses by proposing increases of 7% plus $2.50 to each step of the wage scale (that is – each step would increase by a combination of both 7% and $2.50). The second year we proposed a 7% increase, and the third year we proposed a 5% increase. This was countered by management with an insulting 3% across the board for each of three years.

Management also gave us their counters on the premiums and differentials we proposed - they want to increase most premiums by 25 cents. They also rejected our night shift longevity differential and night shift charge differential meant to retain our experienced nurses on night shift.

Finally, management rejected our proposal to equitably pay nurses with International experience. Nurses with foreign experience are credited for less previous experience when they’re hired compared to nurses with similar experience in the U.S. This is a huge issue for the so many nurses at St. Joe’s who came to us with experience working outside the U.S. or Canada, and shows that St. Joe's commitment to racial justice is, well, skin deep. This inequitable allocation of past experience has the real-life impact of suppressing the wages of RNs with foreign experience – the vast majority of whom are Brown and Black – compared to RNs with only U.S. experience.

Staffing Ratios? Rejected

Our proposal of nurse-to-patient ratios was rejected with the baffling explanation by management that ratios for RNs will mean fewer CNAs. After we dug down into this rationale, what management was saying was, if we agree to more nurses with WSNA, we would make the business decision to cut other staff. We pointed out that that was more of an independent decision on their part rather than an inevitability of staffing ratios. This is a classic management maneuver of trying to pit staff against staff and we reject it - we value our CNAs and other coworkers in SEIU in fighting for a fair contract against St. Joe’s, and see no reason why we can't have safe patient ratios for everyone in the hospital.

We have heard loud and clear across all departments that increasing patient loads of higher acuity are putting nurses in difficult situations. We want to give the best care possible to our community — that is only possible when we have enough nurses to do so.

Safety response

Managements response to the overwhelming majority of nurses who signed the safety petition demanding Andrew Baxter sit down and have an open forum with the nurses who have experienced dangerous parking lots and workplace violence was underwhelming. Many of the responses management did have were essentially watered down versions of what we proposed already at Virginia Mason Medical Center. 

Other things management included in their proposal, like the ability for a nurse to request security to screen a patient with a metal detection wand, are already in place in areas like the ED - and are inadequate. This places the burden on the nurse to 1) call security with a potentially dangerous patient and 2) opens up questions about discrimination and targeting individual patients. We proposed a weapons detector for the ED that everyone has to go through so we can ensure a safer working environment for everyone.

Call Issues

Nurses from GI, Cath Lab, and the OR attended negotiations yesterday as observers and shared the abuses of call they are experiencing. One GI nurse spoke powerfully about the shift where she worked for over twenty hours straight covering three hospitals. After working at St. Joe's, she was called to St. Anthonys in Gig Harbor. She was then called back to Joe's, back to Anthony's, and finally all the way down to St. Clare’s in Lakewood. These conditions put our staff in the position of driving back and forth between hospitals after performing work like performing conscious sedation. (Also – surprise! – management added these extra hospitals to the St. Joe’s nurses docket without bargaining with WSNA.) GI nurses also shared how they’re called back in the middle of the night to wash instruments.

Katy Heffernan in the Cath Lab educated management about how the Hospital’s unlawful changes to call are impacting her unit. One nurse in Cath Lab was on call for 72 hours straight and was called in multiple times over a weekend for elective or diagnostic procedures. Management responded that any inpatient procedure could be considered emergent if deemed necessary by the physician - which sounds like a great way to require nurses to come in for basically any procedure at any time in violation of Washington’s mandatory overtime law.

WSNA proposed an innovative solution to temporarily address current situation of unfilled call shifts in Cath Lab, and all other units in which nurses are required to take call (to replace management’s unlawful, unilaterally implemented idea of “least senior nurse is on call to be on call if someone on call calls out, but we won’t pay them and we’ll put them on administrative leave if they refuse.”). We proposed  offering an incentive of $250 /shift stipend, with management discretion to increase the incentive if there were no volunteers. This is based on the incentive shifts available during COVID - when there were no issues with covering call. Management has not responded to this proposal.

The bad news? Management thinks these proposals are acceptable. The good news? Everyone can do something to show them otherwise. Here are a few of the ways you can get involved

Come Observe on October 16! 

Thank you to all the observers who showed up today and spoke on the issues of call that affect their units. Because of your stories, management came back to us with a new call proposal earlier than they originally planned (albeit a disappointing one).

Chelsea David on the 7th Floor had this to say about the experience:

Sign the Picket Pledge - and ask a coworker to do the same!

Informational pickets are one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal — and are something nurses at St. Joes have lots of practice at! At our last picket three years ago, management doubled their wage proposal in the bargaining session the night before the picket.

We are ready to picket to show management that our nurses are ready to stand up and fight for what they deserve, and that our community supports us too. We need everyone to sign and return a picket pledge so we can assess the willingness of our nurses to picket. There are already pledges floating around break rooms across the hospital, but we need as much help as we can get in having every nurse sign and return one.

If you would like to help with collecting picket pledges, contact WSNA Organizer Grace at glamonte@wsna.org or 206-553-9794 to get started! Collecting pledges is as easy as talking to a coworker in the break room and sending a picture of the pledge sheet to SJMC@wsna.org.

You can find a printable picket pledge here 

Picket FAQs

For more information on pickets, check out our picket FAQ here. We also encourage you to talk with coworkers that have been to a picket before about their experience. Pickets are a powerful, energizing, and FUN! The community shows up to support us every time, and we get to come together to show management that we're standing together for a fair contract.

In solidarity,
Your WSNA Officers and Negotiating Team
Emily Nollmeyer, local unit Co-Chair, Labor and Delivery, day shift
Carina Price, local unit Co-Chair, ICU, night shift
Matthew McGuire, Treasurer/Grievance officer, ED, day shift
Shelly Mead, Grievance officer, ED, day shift
Yunna Flenord, Grievance officer, ICU, night shift
Teresa Kindell, Membership Coordinator, 2S, day shift
Shannon Suchland, Secretary, Walter's OR, day shift
Sally Budack, Co-Secretary, SADU, day shift
Jessica Lenczycki, negotiating team member, Labor and Delivery, night shift
Kate Frazier, negotiating team member, 7^th floor, night shift
Sarah Guillen, negotiating team member, EP, day shift
Kat Jabasa, negotiating team member, Main OR, day shift

You can contact WSNA Nurse Representative Jared Richardson, MSN, RN, at jrichardson@wsna.org or WSNA Organizer Grace LaMonte at glamonte@wsna.org.