Santa Clara nurses start strike in contract dispute

Santa Clara County nurses donning cobalt blue shirts with their union logo rang cow bells and waved signs calling for a fair contract in front of Valley Medical Center on Tuesday morning as they entered the first day of a three-day strike.

The nurses, members of the Registered Nurses Professional Association, embarked on the union's first strike as negotiations with the county have reached an impasse over wage increases and working conditions.

“We just want completive wages so we feel respected,” said Jennifer Hughes, a registered nurse at Valley Medical Center for the last 11 years. “We just want to feel safe and want our patients to be safe.”

The nurses association represents more than 3,750 nurses in the Santa Clara Valley Healthcare system, which is California's second-largest county-owned health and hospital system and has 1 million patient visits annually. Nurses are picketing this week at the system's three main hospitals:

and O'Connor Hospital in San Jose; and St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy.

Alyssa Dulong, who has worked at Valley Medical Center for 11 years and with the county for 29 years, said nurses are concerned about changes the county wants to make in determining how sick a patient is. The sicker a patient is, the more likely they are to get more focused care.

“If we have to take care of more patients that are sicker that should have more of our attention, that's not safe for them and that's not safe for us,” Dulong said.

The nurses have been without a contract since October and are asking the county for a 15% wage increase through October 2025 that's 5% annually and starts retroactive to their contract's expiration date.

The last proposal that the union rejected was put together by a third-party mediator in late March and offered the nurses a 13% raise between now and October 2026, with 3% at ratification, 4% in October, another 4% in October 2025 and 2% in October 2026.