Nurses made good on their promise to begin picketing at six of Providence Health & Services’ eight facilities on Tuesday following a breakdown in negotiations that have stretched for more than nine months at facilities located across the length of the state.
In Newberg, about 20 nurses — many with children and family members joining in — took to the corner of Highway 99W and Providence Drive to heft signs and demonstrate against Providence Newberg Medical Center.
Providence and nearly 3,000 nurses at PNMC and five other facilities reached an impasse in negotiations, prompting the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) union to deliver a 10-day notice to strike two weeks ago. The ONA represents nearly 20,000 nurses and other health care workers across the state.
The two parties are at odds primarily over salary, benefits, staffing levels and the loss of paid time off (PTO).
“Our hospital pays less than any other Providence (facility) and less than most other hospitals,” said Beth Lepire, a charge nurse in the birthing center at PNMC. “So, it’s really hard to recruit the nurses that we need here. We have to recruit from the Portland area, the Salem area – Newberg is not a big enough place to recruit all (the nurses needed). And to keep them, because we keep losing nurses to other hospitals that pay better and have better health care benefits.”
She explained that, from a staffing perspective, each hospital has a committee that determines staffing level in adherence with state law. The law requires and union representatives are demanding that hospitals set realistic levels of staff based on individual hospitals and their unique needs.
PNMC has roughly 220 nurses, ranging in age and experience from individuals in their early 20s to a gentleman Lepire mentioned who was in his early 70s and works in the facility’s medical surgery unit. Lepire is an 18-year veteran of nursing, having worked for a year at Providence St. Vincent in Portland and for 17 years at Willamette Valley Medical Center in McMinnville before signing on at PNMC.
Providence Health & Services is a nonprofit organization founded and run by the Catholic church, but Lepire said that shouldn’t matter when it comes to negotiating with the nurses.
“They still have the billions to spend and buy other hospitals. So, even though it’s a not-for-profit …,” she said, opining that PNMC is understaffed.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” she said. “We’ve got nine open full-time shifts just in the (emergency department) … we have a couple in the birthing center. It’s just hard, it’s hard to recruit.”
The ONA strike will continue through the end of the day Thursday; replacement workers have been hired to work at the hospital through Sunday.
PNMC’s chief administrative officer, Andrew Haslam, said the transition to replacement nurses “went smoothly across all six campuses” with non-striking caregivers providing the necessary oversight of the replacements.
“We are open and providing the excellent care our patients expect from Providence Newberg,” Haslam said, adding that the replacements will remain in place through the morning of June 23. “If you have a critical, emergency need, come to us and be assured we will take care of you.”
Lepire and others are unsure what the next step is.
“Friday morning we find out if we can come back to work,” she said. “We’d like to come back to work, but they must lock us out (for three days) because they have to pay the strike workers for no less than five days.”
As predicted, the negotiations stopped when the strike began.
“Yeah, they told us that if we were going to authorize a strike vote they were going to stop negotiations — they wouldn’t negotiate with us anymore,” Lepire said. “We said, ‘hey, we’ll keep going,' and they said ‘nope, we refuse.’”
She is somewhat optimistic the two sides will end the impasse now that the union has added more strikers at three Providence facilities in Hood River, Milwaukie and Medford.
“So, we were hoping that by gaining the other hospitals that would speak a louder voice to Providence, saying, ‘Hey, you know, you’ve got six hospitals now talking to you …,” Lepire said. “After this, if they still don’t want to negotiate, they don’t want to budge, then the doctors and the nurse practitioners and the nurse midwives that work for Providence are also renegotiating their contracts …”
Those other health care professionals were recently allowed to join the ONA, Lepire said, including some doctors.
“They are working on their contracts and they’re not working with the doctors either,” she said. “So, they said they would stand with us and if they don’t have a contract as well.”
The ONA and Providence management had been in negotiations for up to nine months at some facilities — including three days of federal mediation in early June — but have remained at loggerheads without reaching a contract. Nurses have been working under expired contracts since last fall and voted in late May to authorize the strike.
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