Union Not Allowed To Meet In Hospital So Sacred Heart Nurses Have Two Meetings In The Snow

Nurses at Sacred Heart Medical Center shivered in the snow Monday after being told they could not have union meetings inside the hospital.

The nurses were asked twice to leave the hospital cafeteria because their meetings were not for professional reasons.

So the nurses met outside - once at 7:30 a.m. and again at 3:30 p.m. - to talk about contract proposals from the hospital and the nurses union.

“The nurses were very angry,” said nurse Barbara Heimbigner, co-chairwoman for the Sacred Heart unit of the Washington State Nurses Association. “They couldn’t believe the hospital was doing this.”

The union plans to file a labor complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

The nurses’ three-year contract expires this year, and negotiations have just started between the union and hospital management.

Heimbigner said nurses have had labor meetings inside the hospital for five years. But hospital administrators said Sacred Heart never has allowed nurses to have labor meetings in the hospital.

“We have always asked that they hold those meetings outside the facility,” spokeswoman Marilyn Thordarson said.

Nobody in management remembered nurses using a hospital meeting room to discuss labor strategy.

Monday’s meetings originally were scheduled for a hospital meeting room. But last week, administrators told the union the meetings wouldn’t be allowed.

The union then decided to meet in the hospital cafeteria.

“It was a public place,” Heimbigner said. “We weren’t going to disrupt anything. We were going to meet and talk about things.”

But just as the meetings were about to begin, Heimbigner was pulled aside and told the nurses couldn’t meet in the cafeteria.

About 80 nurses showed up for the 7:30 a.m. meeting, most of them at the end of their night shifts. After being asked to leave, they met outside for about 45 minutes.

About 125 nurses gathered for the 3:30 p.m. meeting, only to file outside to meet.

Hospital administrators said they didn’t force the nurses to meet in the cold.

“They were not asked to go outside,” said Dianna Hollingworth, vice president for human resources at Sacred Heart. “They could have met anywhere (else) in this city. The choice to meet outside was theirs.”

The dispute puts additional strain on an already tense year for labor negotiations, nurses said.

Nurses are developing a proposal that addresses staffing, nurse-patient ratios and their patient safety concerns. They also want pay comparable with nurses’ pay at other hospitals in Washington.

Hospital administrators said they would rather not talk about labor negotiations right now.

“It’s just extremely premature to comment on what the issues would be,” Hollingworth said.

The next negotiations between nurses and management are scheduled for this Friday and Dec. 29 and 30.

The nurses bargaining unit plans to find a meeting place outside the hospital for its next meeting with members on Monday.

, DataTimes