Why Stanford nurses are preparing to strike
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, on Monday he’ll walk a picket line.
“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. Last Monday, 8,000 nurses across Northern California staged a one-day strike 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 last 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% last February.
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 like 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 past week, when nurses staged a oneday 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.