St. Vincent's Strike

Note from David Schildmeier, MNA's Director of Public Communicaitons - Below is a wonderful Op Ed by contributing columnist to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Kenneth J. Moynihan, which speaks volumes for the level of public support for the plight of the courageous nurses of St. Vincent's Hospital, who are willing to put their livelihoods on the line for their right to have a voice in the decisions impacting their patients, decent working conditions and their ability to practice nursing as it was meant to be practiced. 

Why People Side With Nurses in Dispute
Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Kenneth J. Moynihan. Wednesday, March 22, 2000

It should come as no surprise to the management of St. Vincent's Hospital that most of us are rooting for the nurses.

Maybe, strictly speaking, the public should be neutral in this dispute.  We have no way of knowing the precise details of wages and working conditions at the hospital. 

We don't know who said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing at one point or another during the two years the nurses have been working without a contract.

Maybe we should be neutral, but most of us are not. That's mostly because we respect and trust the nurses much more than we do Tenet Healthcare Corp.

We're biased in the nurses' favor for a lot of reasons. We believe that health-care providers are being asked to do too much with too little help, and we believe that patient care has suffered as a result. We believe that because of what we've experienced, what we've heard from other patients and their families, what we've heard from nurses and doctors and other medical professionals.

HAPPENING EVERYWHERE
This is not only a problem at St. Vincent's of course. It's happening just about everywhere in the system, from the crowded offices of the HMO doctors to the disgracefully understaffed nursing homes. But it is a problem at St.  Vincent, and we do not blame the nurses.

We're biased in their favor because we want to be able to count on the attention of skilled and highly motivated nurses when we need out-patient or hospital services. We don't want to place our health in the hands of people who feel systematically overworked and under-appreciated and wish they could be doing something else.

We're on their side because we've read in the newspapers what the St.  Vincent management thinks it should be able to do. We've read that the hospital wants to be able to change nurses' shifts and hours without notice, and that it wants to be able to send people home on days that turn out to be less busy than expected.

We know the nurses. They have all put in hard years of professional training and hard years on the job, and they don't expect or deserve to be managed like teen-agers working for the summer at a supermarket.

Many of them are parents with the same sorts of demanding family responsibilities other working fathers and mothers struggle to cope with. We think it would be very difficult for them and for their children if they were subject to unanticipated changes in their working schedules or had to lose pay or vacation time because their bosses thought things were on the quiet side on a given day.

SIZE OF VOTE
People are inclined to sympathize with the nurses because of the size of the strike authorization vote. We know that 87 percent of the St. Vincent's nurses took part, and a strike was authorized by a vote of 376 to 146. Knowing how much the nurses must hate the prospect of going on strike, when we see nearly three-quarters of participants voting to authorize that course, we conclude that there must be some serious problems with the way those people have been treated.

And then there is the question of the union itself. Many people don't immediately sympathize with unions the way they once did, but when we read that a hospital wants to be able to change people's schedules without consultation or notice, many of us suspect that the nurses would really be in trouble if they did not have a union to fight for them.

And so there is among us considerable sympathy for the demand that the contract guarantee union recognition should the Worcester Medical Center be sold. It's long, hard work to build a union, and we can understand why the nurses would not feel very safe if they knew they might have to start from scratch with a new owner.

There's something else that contributes to our bias in favor of the nurses. It's the whole spectacle of health care as a profit-making business.

We remember the Sisters of Providence who ran the hospital for so many years, and we recall why it made sense to us that a hospital, like a school or a church, should be a nonprofit enterprise. We believed that medicine was too important—too sacred, really—to be dispensed like hot dogs or fur coats or overshoes.

BOTTOM-LINE MENTALITY
We're uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with the bottom-line mentality that has come to dominate even the nonprofit sectors of the health-care industry, so we find it difficult to root for Tenet Healthcare Corp., the for-profit company headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., that owns St.  Vincent Hospital.

We know that when management talks about all the efficiencies it needs to achieve, all the costs it needs to keep down, it is including in its calculations the profits that must sooner or later be realized by the Tenet shareholders. 

When the Sisters of Providence saved a dollar in operating costs, it was to keep the hospital solvent so that it could continue to treat patients.  When they worked their nurses hard, and I'm sure they did, it was for a cause higher than profits for the owners.

So it's difficult, impossible for many of us, to remain neutral in this very unwelcome dispute. We would like to believe in something like Tenet promised in the special supplement published last Sunday by the Telegram & Gazette: "Even though the building may be new, the compassion and concern inside will be familiar. In this new home, our dedicated people will continue to deliver the very best care they know how to every patient that comes through our handsome new doors—just as they have done in this community for more than a hundred years."

If that does not happen, we will all be very disappointed, but most of us will not be blaming the nurses.

Kenneth J. Moynihan's column appears regularly in the Telegram & Gazette.  ©2000 Worcester Telegram & Gazette

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