Two-Day Strike to Hit California Hospitals

By JIM CARLTON, Wall Street Journal

SAN FRANCISCO—A health-care workers union plans a two-day strike starting Tuesday at the University of California’s five medical centers, prompting officials at the nationally renowned hospitals to cancel hundreds of surgeries and chemotherapy treatments.
 
Leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, representing about 13,000 patient-care workers, called for the strike to pressure UC officials into meeting demands, including for more staffing and curtailed executive pensions.
 
UC officials on Monday sought a court order barring from the strike as many as 700 workers who help staff critical departments such as intensive-care units and burn wards. Union officials said they plan to exempt about 120 of the workers in those units from the strike. A state Superior Court judge hadn’t ruled in the case as of Monday afternoon.
 
UC officials were laying plans to deal with the impact at its big medical centers in Los Angeles, Irvine, San Diego, Davis and San Francisco. At UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, more than 150 surgeries have been canceled, including five for children with congenital heart disease, said Joshua Adler, chief medical officer of the 660-bed hospital, which treated 37,560 emergency-room patients in the 2011-2012 fiscal year.
 
Todd Stenhouse, a spokesman for the union, said Monday the UC administrators had compromised patient safety “by virtue of chronic understaffing” of its medical centers and diverting resources by giving executives too much in pension pay. “This strike is about patient care,” he said.
 
Dwaine Duckett, UC’s vice president for system-wide human resources, said Monday that the system’s staffing is adequate, and that the real issue in this labor dispute is the union’s reluctance to pay more into a pension program as part of changes that most other of the UC unions have accepted.
 
In 2008, a union representing service workers such as those in hospital cafeterias staged a five-day walkout at the UC medical centers.

[Source]: The Wall Street Journal