Stanford: Stanford Hospitals: Background

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Stanford Hospitals: Background

STANFORD HOSPITALS: BACKGROUND

Stanford Hospital and Clinics and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital are part of the prestigious Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto. With a combined 713 beds, they admit approximately 33,000 patients each year, provide nearly 510,000 outpatient visits, and treat 42,000 emergency-room patients. In 2006-7, the hospitals drew revenues of $2.1 billion, revenues exceeded expenses by $337 million, and their net assets increased by $500.8 million, making them among the most lucrative hospitals in the state.

The hospitals’ front-line caregivers are the vital link between Stanford’s worldclass reputation and resources and effective care for their patients. More than 1,400 Stanford caregivers – including nursing assistants, technical, clerical and support staff – are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Recently, the hospitals have taken steps that undermine not only caregivers’ working conditions, but also their efforts to protect patient care and assure quality staffing. These include:

∙ Safe and quality staffing: Stanford has refused to adopt the type of labor-management “safe staffing” committees used by many hospitals in California. These provide an essential voice for caregivers in staffing decisions, and neutral arbitration of disagreements. Stanford has also refused to contribute to a jointly-controlled employee training and upgrade fund, used by an increasing number of hospitals to help caregivers prepare for positions where there are shortages and to adapt effectively to evolving clinical practices, medical technologies and community needs.

∙ Job assignments: In late 2007, Stanford hospital managers announced that they would no longer consult with workers’ representatives about changes in job assignments and workloads. These include grueling work assignments in the transportation department that lead to increased absenteeism, and dramatically increased workloads for housekeeping staff, which threaten their ability to provide an infection-free environment for patients.

∙ Fair pay and benefits: Caregivers’ wages are 10 to 20 percent or more below those at other area hospitals (including Kaiser Permanente and/or Catholic Healthcare West) in a range of jobs, including EEG Technician, Cardiovascular Technician, Anesthesia Technician, Patient Transporter, Cook and Medical Transcriber. Stanford has also failed to adopt industry-standard provisions regarding caregiver pensions, retiree health benefits, and employer-paid health insurance for employees’ families.

∙ Nonstandard employees: Stanford makes extensive use of part-time and on-call employees to provide patient care, and has refused to end the practice of subcontracting. As of August 2005, for example, Stanford Hospital and Clinics employed 1,853 part-time and “as-needed” staff, accounting for more than a third of its employees and over 20 percent of employee hours. Extensive use of nonstandard employees and substandard pay and benefits make it difficult to retain the type of stable, qualified workforce needed to deliver quality care to patients.

∙ Workers’ rights: Stanford has rebuffed efforts by the caregivers’ union to begin a dialogue about how to build the same constructive relationship between caregivers and management that the union has developed at dozens of California hospitals. The hospitals have instead imposed increasingly restrictive practices limiting the access of union staff to carry out their representational activities (including having union staff detained and placed under citizen’s arrest by local police), and have withheld hundreds of thousands of dollars in caregivers’ union fees, rather than forwarding the funds to their union. Hospital managers have also announced that they would no longer take part in established procedures for arbitrating employee grievances, and would even refuse to honor decisions by mutually selected labor arbitrators to reinstate employees who were unjustly fired.

Labels: stanford hospital background, union organizing