Many students probably think of hospitals as whitewashed
bastions of modern medicine: clean, efficient and well-staffed.
But, according to healthcare union organizers, L.A. hospitals
are the farthest from.
Union leaders and registered nurses came to campus Friday
evening to advocate student involvement with labor unions and shed
some light on the conflict between hospitals and employees.
The event, which was sponsored by Samahang Pilipino and the
Service Employees International Union, hit close to home for the 50
Pilipino students in attendance, over half of whom have families in
healthcare.
“This is something that hits the Pilipino community
particularly hard because our community is so immersed in the
healthcare community,” explained Emerson Lego, a fifth-year
biochemistry student and president of Samahang Pilipino.
Luisa Blue, a registered nurse and president of the Local 121RN
that represents registered nurses, estimated about 40 percent of
registered nurses in Southern California are Pilipino and are
standing in the vanguard of the protest movement.
“It’s basically a war inside the hospitals,”
she said, adding hospital employees in Southern California are not
unionized, have low wages, work in dismal conditions, and suffer
from severe short-staffing.
“You’ve got registered nurses screaming for help on
the floor because they’re risking the lives of their patients
and their licenses,” she said.
Jonah Lalas, an organizer with the SEIU who graduated from UCLA
last year, said one of the big quandaries facing hospitals is the
high turnover rate of experienced nurses.
“The problem is there’s a lot of nurses out there
who end up leaving because they don’t want to deal with these
stressful conditions,” he said, adding that nurses tend to go
into private practice rather than work in the public healthcare
system.
Profit-motivation for hospitals also contributes to the crisis,
organizers claim, as hospitals are bought out by large corporations
who care more about money than patients.
“They’re going to force a registered nurse to take
care of 10-12 patients,” Blue said, creating an
“assembly line” of patients as nurses dedicate little
time to personal care.
Among the speakers was Rose Sommer, a Pilipino nurse who was
fired, along with 17 other nurses, from her job at Queen of Angels
Hospital when they protested the terrible conditions.
“Nurses aren’t being treated as professionals
anymore, but we’re at the forefront of healthcare,” she
said.
At Queen of Angels, nurses were forced to preform clerical tasks
in addition to attending patients, and often had to abandon one ill
patient for another patient because of staffing shortages, Sommer
claims. In the surgical intensive care unit, management assigned
six patients per nurse though state law allows, at most, two
patients per nurse.
Even though Queen of Angels hired Sommer back in January after
she renegotiated her contract, she said the fight was far from
over.
“There’s still a lot of work to do. It’s still
a struggle,” she said.
Union leaders urged Pilipino students to take internships or
short-term jobs with labor groups to help change the situation.
“When I graduated I never thought I would work with labor
and healthcare, but after hearing what you heard tonight I decided
to join the SEIU,” said Monica Villalobos, an organizer with
SEIU and a graduate of University of California, Davis.
Lalas, who took an SEIU summer job straight out of college,
agreed.
“My experience at SEIU taught me you don’t have to
look at the world to find injustice. There’s injustice right
here at home,” he said.