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By Erika Fricke 

Daily Planet Staff 

A rhythmic call and response echoed out from under the protection of the eaves over the UC Berkeley Student Union. “What’s this about?” yelled the health care worker with a megaphone. “Patient care!” The crowd yelled back.  

“What do you want,” she yelled, pointing at a section of the crowd. “Contract!” 

Service Employee International Union Local 250 members from 18 California hospitals, 15 from the Bay Area, went out on a one-day strike Thursday calling for a greater employee voice in staffing decisions, and job security during hospital consolidations.  

John Borsos, president of SEIU Local 250’s hospital division, said, “There’s been an increase in volume of patients and a reduction in staff.”  

Union members said the lack of adequate staffing has affected quality of care across the board. A brief on the union’s Web site, “Critically Short-Staffed,” said that fewer dietary aides are available to assure that patients’ allergies are accounted for, and the necessary disinfecting doesn’t always get done. 

“What I’ve noticed since Sutter has taken over is that the hospital is less clean,” said Fred Barcelo a licensed psychiatric technician and 21 year employee of Alta Bates. The hospital, Alta Bates/Summit Medical Center, is a result of a merger last year between Alta Bates in Berkeley and Summit Medical Center in Oakland. As a result of the merger, Alta Bates came under Sutter control.  

“Less people are doing more work, so things aren’t getting done,” Barcelo said. 

For example, he said, “On our unit on a regular basis housekeeping would do extra cleanup, wash vinyl chairs that patients have sat on. That’s not being done until it becomes so obviously necessary that someone calls them to come do it.” 

“It’s a hard job,” said Carolyn Kemp, public affairs officer for Alta Bates, in response to the statements that hospital understaffing created problems for employees and patients. “We recognize the fact that everyone who is working in health care right now is working very hard.” 

Borsos said the union solution is to create a standing committee of frontline health care workers and hospital representatives to discuss staffing issues. If the committee cannot work the issues out, a third party mediator would make a binding decision. “Our experience is now that these decisions are made by accountants and people that aren’t interested in patient care, they’re interested in crunching numbers to maximize profit,” said Borsos. 

Wanda Jones, president of the New Century Health Care Institute, describes herself as a health care researcher and futurist on the health care system. “There’s been an increased workload for nursing staff because the acuity of (illnesses seen in the hospitals) is higher,” she said in a phone interview Thursday. “And there are fewer support staff, because hospitals are paid increasingly less than it costs to do business.” 

She said that Alta Bates almost certainly did not make a profit last year. “(The unions) somehow think that hospitals are hiding money somewhere. Hospitals are losing their very reserves that it takes to keep them in business. The irony is the more the unions press for staffing pattern control the greater the likelihood they’re driving the organizations into bankruptcy and there will be no jobs.” 

Jones added that demand for staff peaks in the wintertime and decreases in the summertime. This means hospitals keep fewer full time staff, she said. 

In order to make up for lack of staff, hospitals bring in registry nurses or temporary workers, according to Alta Bates union employees. “When you’re working short staffed, especially short weekends, and you get people from registry who don’t know what they’re doing your time is taken away from patient care to orient the new staff,” said Barcelo. A registry nurse from Sunrise Staffing, a nurse staffing agency in San Francisco, costs hospitals $180 dollars per day. The Daily Planet was unable to find out specific costs for Alta Bates registry nurses. Regular Alta Bates staff wonder why the money spent on registry nurses can’t be spent to hire new employees. 

Allan Dunbar, union representative said that consolidation of departments across hospitals, meaning the elimination of jobs, remained a major issue for the unions, despite the fact that there has been no downsizing yet. “What we’re telling them is if we are going to consolidate, why don’t we talk about it.” said Dunbar, who wants employees who are let go to be retrained or transferred to another hospital while maintaining seniority. “They’re saying, ‘No’,” he said. 

Kemp was nonplused by the suggestion that Alta Bates may consolidate departments or downsize employees. 

“If nothing else, we’ve added more jobs than a year ago,” she said. “For instance in our cardiac area, we have taken in a great number of new patients from Kaiser Permanente. If you’ve got a cardiac person coming in, he’s going to need a nurse, he’s going to need someone to clean the room.” She said that the job board listed many new positions. 

As of Dec. 14, the Alta Bates Web site employment page listed 20 open positions: Nine required a registered nursing degree, several of them required more advanced degrees, none were for housekeeping or environmental services positions.  

At Alta Bates, union representatives estimated that 500 union members went out on the one-day strike. A few hundred people from several hospitals in the Bay Area marched from the University campus to Alta Bates campus on Ashy Avenue. 

“The last strike a lot of non Local 250 people went to work. They found it really difficult conditions to work under. A lot of them that crossed that time won’t this time,” Barcelo said .  

He said 90 percent of the licensed psychiatric technicians were striking Thursday.  

Mary Barrens was one of many registered nurses out on unofficial strike in support of Local 250. The nurses won the right to a sympathy strike in their contract, and called a sympathy strike for the first Local 250 strike this year. Barrens said 95 percent went out that time. She said that Thursday, all but one of the nurses in her department went out on the unofficial sympathy strike. 

Kemp said, “A good number of our people did not come in, many had planned to but because of the level of threat and anxiety many did not.” 

Nonetheless, she said that the hospital suffered no difficulties because of the strike. “What hospitals do best is plan for the worst and hope for the best. We took informal look at who would or might not come in and made adjustments accordingly,” she said. Adjusting included transferring employees from other regional hospitals and hiring registry nurses. Kemp said that the major impact of the strike was “the intolerable noise.”  

“There are people that are in the hospital because they’re seeking care. There are people that are having babies and people that are dying,” she said. “It’s disrespectful.”