A couple weeks ago I wrote here that nurses at Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto were threatening to strike over pay and working conditions.
They did walk out, and after spending a week on picket lines, they appear to have won.
The union president called the new contract an “enormous victory” and said, “We have won improvements across all the priorities nurses identified at the beginning of our contract campaign.” Read story here.
Details of the contract include “greater access to mental health care and wage increases of seven percent in 2022, five percent in 2023, and an additional five percent in 2024. Under the agreement, nurses in the union will be able to pre-schedule an additional week of vacation, among other benefits.”
The wage increases most likely aren’t raises. They’ll only keep up with inflation.
The nurses very likely were bargaining from a strong position. Nurses are in demand, and there aren’t enough to go around. The demands that have been placed on them aren’t sustainable. And, as I wrote here, they’ve been quitting the profession in droves.
One thing that hasn’t changed, and probably never will, is Republicans’ disrespect for working people. Three years ago, I wrote (here) about a Washington GOP legislator who opposed a bill that would require hospitals to give nurses uninterrupted meal and rest breaks, and claimed, without evidence, that nurses working in small rural hospitals “probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day.”
She’d better hope she doesn’t have another heart attack and depend on a tired, burned-out nurse who can’t keep her eyes open to look after her.