Jennifer Huberdeau, North Adams Transcript, August 20, 2010

North Adams - The registered nurses at North Adams Regional Hospital are looking for community support as they near a September 3 strike date. "In a time of crisis, a family sticks together. We nurses are in crisis, and we need your support," begins a new 30-second television spot filmed by the local unit of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. It goes on to state that nurses are concerned with contract language that would affect the quality of care patients receive and the quality of life of the union’s members.

"We would never know what our paycheck would be or when we would work," a voice-over says at it shows pictures of the hospital’s nursing staff. "The hospital executives want to send us home when they want. You don’t want to be cared for a nurse that is sick or overtired - We are a family and we need your help."

The advertisement also urges community members to call Northern Berkshire Healthcare President and CEO Richard Palmisano directly, providing his office number at the end of the commercial.

Negotiations, which began in January, came to a standstill in July with the union giving advance notice of the strike at the beginning of August. The union has been without a contract since March 31, and a federal mediator has been observing the proceedings since April.

Should the two sides fail to meet a compromise in the coming weeks, the union is set to strike at 6 AM on September 3. Of the union’s 103 members, 90 percent voted on whether or not to go on strike. Out of that number, 99 percent voted in favor of the strike, with only one vote against it.

"Our representative informed the federal mediator today that we are prepared to stay as late as it takes at our next bargaining session on August 31. We’re also prepared to come back on September 1, if needed," Ruth O’Hearn, a registered nurse and co-chairwoman of the local bargaining unit, said Thursday during an editorial board meeting with the Transcript.

She said the statements of hospital executives - in print advertisements and in statements to the press - are misleading and inaccurate. The union isn’t asking for raises or looking for added benefits - it’s just looking to keep its previous contract in tact, she said.

"We’ve had nothing on the table money-wise," O’Hearn said. "What we had on table was a provision that when new technology is purchased, that the nurses want to be involved in the selection process. We’re the ones who have to use the computers at bedside, and it makes sense that we give our input. When we realized that we didn’t have room to negotiate that issue, we withdrew it."

The issues the nurses have with the contract all have to do with the quality of their personal lives and of their ability to deliver quality care to their patients.

"We have moved on our end, but the hospital has not," O’Hearn said.

"The hospital still wants to be able to mandate overtime, send us home when they want and cancel shifts. During the last session, the hospital’s negotiator put forth language that said if that if I came to work on-time and five minutes into my shift the supervisor realized they didn’t need me, they could send me home. They would pay me for the five minutes, plus an additional hour of work. That’s unacceptable."

Union members also take issue with a provision that would change weekend coverage for nurses who work those shifts, which are currently rotated among the staff and prescheduled. The changes would eliminate the preset pattern and would not guarantee a nurse would rotate off the weekend shift.

"The say we may never have a weekend off or that you could work 10 weekends in a row before having one off," Linda Freeney, a registered nurse in the surgical services unit and past bargaining unit chairwoman, said Thursday. "By eliminating that schedule, nurses won’t be able to plan normal things in advance like going to a wedding. The hospital just wants complete control of our lives."

Although Freeney, who has worked at the hospital for 36 years, hasn’t been required to work weekends since joining the surgical services department, she said she’s concerned about the impact any one of the concessions the hospital is looking for would have on herself and the other nurses.

"We love our jobs, but we also want control of our own lives," she said. "We want to know that we’ll have a 40-hour pay week, so that we can meet a mortgage when we want to buy a home or want to buy a car. We need to have a 40-hour pay week if that’s what we plan for - so many things like the federal financial aid FAFSA forms and college loans are all dependent on what we made the year before and are expected to make in the following year."

O’Hearn added that the nurses’ expired contract contains language that says the hospital can mandate nurses, many of whom work 12 hour shifts, to stay for up to two additional hours after a shift, unless they indicate they are too sick or tired. She said the hospital is looking to eliminate that provision, making it possible for a nurse to be required to put in an additional six hours in addition to their regular shift.

"There are national studies that state that the longer a nurse works, the more likely she is to become tired and make an error," she said.

In an interview with the Transcript earlier this week, Palmisano said he’s hoping the two sides will come to a resolution before the impending strike and invited the senior leadership of the Massachusetts Nurses Association to meet with him and other hospital executives in an effort to apprise them of the hospital’s current fiscal situation. Despite selling off Sweet Brook and Sweetwood on August 15, eliminating a $19.9 million debt liability with the sale, the hospital has $46 million in outstanding debt, he said.

Charlie Rasmussen, MNA spokesman, noted on Thursday that the organization’s senior staff doesn’t participate in negotiations and that any appeals for understanding should be made to the local bargaining unit and its assigned MNA negotiator.

"He’s welcome to come to the table too," Freeney said. "He hasn’t been at the negotiating table since our last round of contract negotiations a few years ago. What we have is an expensive lawyer from Ohio at the table, who specializes in union busting."

However, the nurses say they understand the fiscal situation all too clearly, and that they’ve been helping the hospital cut costs all along.

"The hospital had a meeting with us this week regarding the financial situation, and we all know that hospitals are struggling to stay afloat," she said. "Personally, I think I would rather be laid off and seek employment somewhere else, than think I had a job and not have work."

She added, "We’ve all taken on extra responsibilities and we’re working with bare bones. In my department, when we are down a doctor because one has called in sick, we take our benefit time. We don’t stay. When the doctors we work with take vacation, we schedule ours."

O’Hearn said the union has also had to dispel misinformation about their salaries, after the hospital began putting figures out into the community that some nurses were making between $88,000 and $100,000.

"Some of the nurses work six days a week, working overtime and they have earned that money," she said. "You have to be paid for the work you do - we have expenses such as child care. The nurses aren’t like the management, who can go home at the end of their shift. Sometimes we have to work overtime."

Freeney added that the nurses also have to continuously take classes to keep their licenses current and have degrees in their related fields.

"They say we’re abusing overtime, so don’t hire us for the overtime," she said. "You can’t call us in for overtime and then abuse us for having to be paid for it."

While initial support from the community was lackluster, especially after the hospital’s Board of Trustees took out full-page ads chastising the decision to strike, O’Hearn said public opinion has swayed to the side of the nurses since they began talking about the issues of patient safety and the quality of their own lives.

Freeney said it isn’t unusual for the trustees to back the hospital’s executives during contract negotiations, no matter what the situation. She said it’s a move used to sway public opinion.

"At first, I heard a lot of people who were saying we should be happy to have a job," she said. "To me, that’s the equivalent of somebody telling an abused woman she’s lucky to have a husband. Now that people understand what the actual requests from the hospital are, people are supporting us. We want our jobs. I don’t want the community or the hospital to think that we don’t love our jobs. We want to keep our jobs, and we understand that the hospital is tightening its belt. But we’re not going to be the only group to get them out of financial difficulty."

To reach Jennifer Huberdeau, e-mail jhuberdeau@thetranscript.com.

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