Public health nurses sue for overtime pay
Three nurses filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco’s Department of Public Health on Thursday for back pay they say they are entitled to after years of chronic understaffing at public health facilities.
The nurses say the department uses illegal practices to avoid paying overtime. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court, they allege that nurses who work under a civil service appointment are not properly compensated for hours that exceed their standard 40hour work week.
More than 1,300 registered nurses fall into that category and could be owed back pay, according to SEIU Local 1021, the union that represents the nurses. Those nurses, employed at such facilities as San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda Hospital and the county jails, are now eligible to opt into the collective action lawsuit.
“We estimate there are about 90,000 hours a year of unpaid overtime,” said union spokesman Nato Green.
The city’s health department did not reply to requests for comment. The department budgeted $ 25.3 million on overtime for the 201920 fiscal year and spent $ 14.1 million during the first half of the year, according to city budget documents.
“The city values the tremendous work that nurses do throughout its public health care system, particularly during this pandemic,” said John Coté, a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, in a statement. “But we’re not going to litigate cases in the press. We’ll review this lawsuit and address it in court.”
Jennifer Esteem was one of about 20 nurses who demonstrated outside San Francisco General Hospital on Thursday to call attention to a system that she says forces nurses to work mandatory overtime and then “cheats them out of pay” for those overtime hours.
Esteem, a single mother of two boys, recalled being forced to work mandatory overtime during her time as a psychiatric emergency room nurse, often at the expense of her family.
“There were times I had babysitters taking care of my kids and I would finish a shift and they would say, ‘ You can’t leave,’ ” she said of the gutwrenching choice between her patients and her children.
Without a replacement, Esteem said, she couldn’t abandon her patients without risking disciplinary action or the loss of her nursing license. Esteem said she was sometimes told she would be compensated for the overtime, but did not receive the pay.
“As nurses, we agreed to the work, but we want to get paid for the work that we do,” Esteem said, calling the health department’s continued avoidance of overtime pay “an egregious offense.”
The union says the health department relies on faulty data that chronically underestimates the number of patients that will require care in any given year.
“Patient volume consistently exceeds what the Department of Public Health budgets for,” the union said in a statement.
The result is that the department’s staffing model relies on nurses “working massive amounts of unpaid overtime,” the union said.
Dianna Yañez, a labor and delivery nurse, has seen that practice play out over the course of her 34year career at San Francisco General Hospital. She says understaffing has been a consistent problem during the three decades she’s worked for the city.
“There are not enough nurses to run the hospital, because the city refuses to put a budget in place” that doesn’t rely on overtime, Yañez said as she participated in the demonstration outside the hospital. “They should hire more nurses so that we are not in this position.”
The staffing shortage compromises patient safety, she said.
“We missed a thousand meal breaks last year; we work hungry and fatigued,” Yañez said. “When a woman comes in and she’s in labor, we need to attend to her quickly. We can’t let our guard down, especially during COVID.”