By Emma Lierley San Francisco Bay Guardian Wednesday March 26, 2008
Thousands of nurses at eight Sutter Health hospitals in the Bay Area walked off the job Friday, March 21, kicking off a 10-day strike against the Sacramento-based health chain. The California Nurses Association is calling for sufficient staffing levels, adequate break and rest times, and affordable medical coverage for its members. In addition to clashing with its nurses' union, Sutter also sparked controversy recently by threatening to close or scale down St. Luke's, one of only two full-service hospitals south of Market Street.
Irene Terestman, a delivery nurse among the 50 or so strikers on the picket line outside of Sutter's Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley told the Guardian, "Initially [these strikes] seem about the nurses, but it's really always about the patients." After long hours of physical work and no rest, Terestman said, the care given to patients suffers.
"To drive people to work that way, you just wear them down."
Late Friday afternoon Sutter Health released a statement stating that "impressive numbers of nurses ... rebuked" CNA's calls for a walkout. The company claimed about half of all its nurses showed up for that day's morning shifts and used those figures as proof that CNA members are not unified in support of the action. "CNA's strike is a thinly veiled attempt to ... gain the union easier organizing rights and more dues-paying members."
Reached by phone on Monday, CNA official Shum Preston strongly disputed the company's work attendance figures. "Sutter has engaged in a campaign of harassment and intimidation and now lies. Sutter nurses are unified and we're proud that there was 95 percent participation in this strike."
When we asked Preston about the wide discrepancy in the work attendance numbers between the company and the union, he told us, "They're just making stuff up."
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