They have been working without a contract since August 31.

The center is part of the Santa Barbara-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., the second-largest hospital chain in the United States. Tenet is a for-profit "hospital-management" company, which runs 113 general hospitals, including 40 in California.

"This hospital made $11 million last year," said Corrine Comer, staff organizer for the California Nurses Association. "Tenet is leading the privatization of health care by giving RNs more work and more patients."

Tenet has begun using scab nurses; workers report many have been brought in from out of state to replace the strikers. A large percentage of the striking nurses are Filipina. Runette Peralta, Milgrace Cancio, Luz de Jesus, and Gloria Rivera walked the line carrying signs that read, "People before profits" and "I won’t stay for low pay."

"We’re fighting for what we deserve," said striker Luz de Jesus. "Eighteen other Bay Area hospitals have better retirement and pension benefits than what this company is offering."

In part because of the volatility of the stock market, the CNA has demanded a "defined contribution" retirement plan in recent negotiations with hospitals, which they won in recent contracts with health care providers such as Sutter Health, and others.

"An RN who is a good friend of ours retired from here after 40 years," de Jesus explained. "She is paying $1,000 a month for medical benefits for her family. We cannot afford to retire!"  
 
Company’s miserly pension benefits
Many of the strikers contrasted the company’s miserly pension benefits with its "aggressive pricing policies"--performing more complicated medical procedures in order to get bigger payments from Medicare plans. According to the CNA, Medicare’s "outlier" payments to Tenet--payments for particularly costly medical procedures--are nearly three times the national average.

The national average for all hospitals for outlier payments is 3.5 percent of all Medicare payments; these payments comprise 10 percent of Tenet’s Medicare payments. And in California, Tenet’s rate is 14 percent.

At Tenet’s center in Redding, California, two top heart specialists have been accused by state regulators of performing expensive and medically unnecessary heart surgery. The Redding Medical Center had 42.3 percent of Medicare reimbursements come from outlier procedures--nearly eight times the statewide average.

The federal government is now auditing all of Tenet’s Medicare claims. Last summer the Justice Department forced Tenet Healthcare to pay a $17 million fine for overcharging federal health care programs for laboratory tests.

The nurses on strike explain the impact of the company goal of "keeping costs down." They pointed to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reporting that patients are more likely to die following surgery when they outnumber nurses four to one. A higher patient-to-nurse ratio also leads to more nurse burnout, the article stated. "Substantial decreases in mortality rates could result from increasing registered nurse staffing, especially for patients who develop complications," the authors asserted.

The CNA is organizing a big turnout for three public hearings sponsored by the California Department of Health Services in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Fresno in December.

In a related development, 1,400 members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) staged a one-day strike November 13 against Stanford and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. The unionists include lab technicians, housekeepers, food service workers, and nurses assistants who have been working without a contract since November 4.

Bill Kalman is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 120 in San Lorenzo, California.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home