Stanford nurses prepare for walkout
Stanford nurse Mark O'Neill could have quit his job caring for desperately ill COVID and cardiac patients, joining the exodus of other healthcare workers seeking a reprieve from the stress of the past two years.
Instead, he'll walk a picket line Monday.
“I'm exhausted, but we need to push really hard to get help for the issues we're facing,” said O'Neill, one of 5,000 nurses slated to strike next week at prestigious Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital after the collapse of three months of labor negotiations, with no future bargaining sessions scheduled. “We're asking Stanford for a change.”
The Stanford nurses join a growing number of other U.S. healthcare workers with shared grievances about staffing, pay, benefits and quality of life that have mounted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eight thousand nurses across Northern California staged a one-day strike Monday at 18 Sutter Health facilities. Recent health care strikes also occurred in Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Montana and Alabama. A massive strike of 50,000 Kaiser healthcare workers was narrowly averted in November.
With nurses in short supply, unions have new leverage — and have emerged as increasingly powerful voices in a tight job market. Fatigued by the pandemic, many nurses are rethinking their careers. A new McKinsey report found that the share of nurses who said they were likely to leave
their positions in the coming year rose to 32%, up from 22% in February 2021.
Stanford nurses are asking for annual wage increases of 7% for each of the next two years and 6% in the final year of their contract, with $3,000 bonuses and ongoing mental health counseling. They want to use all allotted vacation time, have a say in weekend shifts and get extra pay for critical care nurses.
This will boost staffing levels, they say, because it will be easier to recruit and retain workers.
Stanford is offering wage increases — 5%, 4% and 3%, plus ratification and retention bonuses. In the first year, annual base salaries for entry level nurses would start at $143,000 and climb to $211,500 for nurses at the top of the pay scale.
In preparation for Monday's walkout, “strike nurses” from around the nation are being flown into the Bay Area and delivered by bus to Stanford's top-ranked hospitals. Strike nurses are typically the highest compensated
nurses in the industry, with agencies such as HSG and U.S. Nursing paying $12,000 to $13,000 a week to the Stanford replacements.
“If you put your badge down, I'm going to pick it up,” said Aleehya Carr of San Antonio, Texas, who hopes to work the Stanford strike. “People walk out on patients that still need help. … Imagine if it was your mother or your father.”
But the regular nurses have their own set of frustrations toward the highly paid temps. That tension played out at Sutter Health this week, when nurses staged a one-day walkout but were replaced for the whole week by contract nurses.
“They're getting housed, they're getting transported to the hospital, they're getting fed, they have extra lab people and clerks — all the things that we want,” said Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, a registered nurse who has worked in Eden's intensive care unit in Castro Valley for 30 years. “They're also getting different salaries and that's what's encouraging nurses to come out here.”
During the pandemic nursing shortage, hospitals have increasingly turned to high-paid travel nurses to fill the gaps, fostering resentment year-round.
To reduce its workload next week and ensure it can provide critical and emergency care, Stanford may reschedule some elective procedures, said spokesperson Julie Greicius. But the larger issue looms.
There are several reasons why nurses have chosen this moment to push for change, said Joanne Spetz, director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UC San Francisco.
For one, contracts have expired, so it's time to renegotiate. Nurses have seen profits rise at Stanford and other large health systems, even as COVID cases soared. According to the university's 2021 annual report, revenues at the two hospitals exceeded expenses by $845 million, compared to $107 million in 2020 — although some of that was due to one-time federal relief grants.
Nurses also know they are harder to replace — and want their contributions acknowledged in the form of improved working conditions, protected vacation time, higher wages and better benefits.
“Nurses have given so much during this pandemic,” Spetz said.
On a relative basis, nursing is a lucrative profession, and not just for the strike replacements. But throughout the country, nurses say they're depleted by long hours and short staffing, and traumatized by the magnitude of death.