Nurses turned down the contract not just because it offered modest pay increases and immodest increases in health insurance costs for workers — as much as a 10-percent hike each year with some nurses paying as much as $700 a month for insurance. And they didn’t reject it solely because of the increased workload of tasks that take nurses away from their primary mission, bedside care of patients.
“We’re very concerned about the future of patient care at the University of Chicago Medical Center,” says union negotiating committee member and RN Tom Magana. “If this trend continues, it will erode professional standards and drive experienced RNs away and not recruit good new RNs.”
The accumulation of grievances has led to “low morale,” says RN and negotiator Mona Cetnar. “Nurses rejected the contract,” she says, “because they were unhappy in general.”
Hospital nurses across the country are unhappy for many of the same reasons and, like the roughly 1,400 UCMC nurses, face employers making extravagant demands for concessions on both work standards and financial packages.
“I think UCMC hospitals are very typical, and a prime example of what’s happening now, especially in these large, rich and powerful employers, says Jill Furillo, the lead contract official with National Nurses United. (NNU comprises recently merged California Nurses Association/NNOC, the United American Nurses, which included the Illinois Nurses Association that originally organized UCMC, and other state groups.)
Even during the recession, the healthcare industry has prospered. Unlike Cook County Hospital, where a government financial crisis threatens the hospital budget and complicates ongoing contract talks, UCMC is doing fine and now building a major expansion.
Nevertheless, thriving UCMC uses “the economic times” as an excuse for its concession demands, Furillo says. At the bargaining table, the UCMC’s representative is a lawyer with a prominent union-busting firm, and nurses believe that management would like to destroy their union.
The union pushes for reforms beyond the contract, such as establishing patient/nurse ratios based on the acuity of patient health problems – although they ought to also negotiate appropriate ratios of managers to patients and managerial to worker pay, one nurse quipped.
But it is also contemplating taking a strike vote, even though no one knows of a time when UCMC nurses struck. At the same time, NNU is mobilizing support for the nurses and providing strategic and bargaining advice for whenever hospital managers are willing to sit down again and negotiate.
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
