In the oft-bitter battle, the mudslinging came from both sides. University administrators called the union intractable and said it put political gain ahead of its members’ interests. The union representing the university’s 9,000 nurses said UC administrators were simply Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political flunkies who didn’t care if the workers threw out their backs dragging around obese patients. Now, after nearly a year of fighting, the two sides have made peace — temporarily.
Nurses at UC medical centers, like Thornton Hospital employee Patrick Lutz, have been wrangling with the university over new contracts for nearly a year.
The governor started the name-calling in a speech early last year. Speaking at a public event that was disrupted by protesters from the California Nurses Association — which represents the UC nurses — he said that the union was simply a “special interest” upset with him “because I’m always kicking their butts.”
However, in the final weeks of the year, the university and the CNA broke through a months-long impasse to agree on a two-year contract for the nurses working at UC medical centers. The deal, approved by the nurses a week before Christmas, includes a significant wage increase, pension protections and a ban on mandatory overtime.
“We are very happy to have reached this agreement with our nurses, as it will ensure UC will be able to continue to provide the quality care that exemplifies all UC medical centers,” UC Executive Director of Labor Relations Howard Pripas stated in a university press release. “This agreement will help UC to attract and retain the quality nurses that are in such high demand in California.”
The deal was one of four agreements the university made among a flurry of negotiations in the last month of the year. Several days after the nurses’ vote, UC research and technical workers approved a separate agreement with the university, which also included a pay hike. Two other tentative agreements included clerical and library employees.
“The pay raises are a step in the right direction for recruiting more nurses,” stated UCSD Medical Center nurse Janice Webb, who served as a member of the negotiating team, in a union announcement of the vote results.
In exchange, the nurses agreed not to carry out sympathy strikes in disputes involving other university unions. On another contentious issue that eluded agreement for months, the university said it would allow nurses to form “lift teams” or use lift devices to move heavy patients.
However, the new contract does not address the crucial question of staffing ratio — which was at the heart of the dispute — with both parties instead agreeing to allow for an independent arbitrator to make a final, and binding, decision on the issue.
The staffing question was largely responsible for exacerbating the rift between the two sides early last year, when Schwarzenegger attempted to block an increase in mandated nursing levels in the state’s hospitals that was signed into law by his Democratic predecessor. During the ensuing confusion, the nurses demanded that the university write the higher ratios into any new contract; CNA painted the UC refusal to do so as an attempt to ally with the governor.
As talks grew bitter, especially when the nurses scheduled a one-day walkout only to be blocked from striking by a judge’s injunction, the union linked the UC negotiations to a larger political dispute between the governor and the state’s public employees’ unions.
In its statement, the union maintained that connection, arguing that the “UC nurses’ 11-month contract fight coincided with Schwarzenegger’s attack on nurses, teachers and firefighters this year.”
“UC has been a close ally of the Schwarzenegger administration in his attempts to reduce public sector pensions (including UC) and to weaken the staffing ratios governing hospital staffing in California,” the CNA stated.
Both the university and the state Public Employment Relations Board, which joined the request asking the courts to block the nurses’ strike, vehemently denied that politics played any role.
In recent months, the unions were strengthened by two events: a defeat of Schwarzenegger’s self-proclaimed “reform agenda” in the November statewide special election and controversy surrounding the transparency of the university’s compensation.
The CNA, with other state-worker unions, spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat the governor-backed initiatives and looked at the outcome as a political victory. Several weeks later, the San Francisco Chronicle began publishing a series of articles suggesting that the university gave more than $800,000 in previously unreported compensation to its workers last year and may have violated UC policy in offering half a million dollars to a UC Davis administrator who threatened to sue the university for racial discrimination.
The report stoked the fires of nurses’ union leaders, who had all along accused the university of ignoring the needs of its workers while bestowing riches on the medical center executives.
In e-mail feedback collected by the university through a special Web site set up in response to the articles, and obtained by the Chronicle under the state’s public records act, several responders claiming to be workers tied the compensation controversy to the contract talks.
“SHAME ON YOU PIGS AT THE TROUGH!!!” stated one comment, signed as “a UC manager.” “PARTICULARLY WHEN YOU UNDER-PAY MOST EMPLOYEES and ACT AS AN ‘ENRON/ WORLDCOM TYPE’ WHEN YOU BARGAIN DISHONESTLY WITH THE UNIONS. YOU HAVE TARRED ALL OF US WITH YOUR SHAMEFUL AND GREEDY TACTICS.”
In response to criticism, the regents of the university asked a blue-ribbon committee to conduct an independent audit.
Because of the political nature of the talks between the university and the nurses, they may offer a preview for the entire state in the upcoming year. In 2006, 18 of the 21 bargaining units representing California’s public employees will be in contract talks.
The UC agreement, though, is likely only a temporary detente; in the spring, the CNA and the university will reopen the newly signed contract to discuss retirement and health benefits, among other equally contentious issues.
