Dozens of off-shift health care workers rallied outside Swedish Issaquah on Wednesday as part of an organized “informational picket” to bring attention to labor negotiations over Swedish Medical Center’s contracts with registered nurses, technical workers and service employees.
The contracts that covered those workers from 2011 to 2015 expired midnight July 1. Representatives for the nonprofit and SEIU Healthcare 1199NW have been in negotiations since April.
Deanna Tregoning, a nurse working in Swedish Issaquah’s intensive care unit and a union representative in bargaining, noted that this is the union’s first time at the table with Swedish since it affiliated itself with Providence Health & Services in 2012.
Five minutes before noon on Wednesday, Tregoning grabbed a handout and silently mouthed the chants she had practiced with 100 other employee union reps at the South Lake Union Best Western the day before. Satisfied, she handed the sheet off to the chant leader and her megaphone.
“Providence, don’t you care?” the picketers chanted as they circled the northeast corner of the campus. “(You) Put profits before health care!”
SEIU’s press materials, sent out prior to picketing, repeatedly state that Swedish made $110 million in profit in 2014 and should reinvest that money into its caregivers.
Tregoning elaborated that the union wants compensation and benefits that will attract new workers and retain existing workers to prevent understaffing. Swedish hospitals have 1,600 job vacancies, 700 of which are nurses, she said. Meanwhile, Tregoning said she knows coworkers who are in collections for health care received by their own employer under an unfavorable medical plan.
“We’re down 1,600 people and we think there’s a reason for that,” she said.
But June Altaras, Swedish’s system chief executive for acute care, said attaching the words “profit” and “vacancies” to those figures is misleading. For instance, Swedish is a nonprofit healthcare organization and the $110 million identified as profit is actually operating revenue after expenses used to purchase vital medical equipment, she said.
Likewise, the 1,600 vacancies actually reflect a calculated estimate of hires Swedish needs to make for 2016, taking into account projected patient volume and anticipated employee turnover.
That expected turnover ties into an aging workforce and a longstanding national nurse shortage, Altaras said.
“It was predicted 20 years ago that we would have this shortage,” she said. “The tough part with the crash in 2008 was that it masked the shift. About 50 percent of nurses are Baby Boomers and when the financial crisis occurred, they stayed in the workforce a little longer. Now that it’s over, the exodus is more obvious.”
According to a fact sheet provided by Swedish, management has offered up to an 11 percent increase to wages over three years and a choice of three health plans, including a health savings account, a union-requested HMO and the existing preferred provider plan, which would remain in effect through the end of 2016.
Julie Popper, a spokesperson for SEIU, estimated management and employees had met a dozen times without progress. The employees have the right to strike should negotiations reach an impasse, she said.
But previous contract negotiations have been protracted before while avoiding a strike, Altaras said.
“I’m a nurse and I worked at bedside for 25 years,” she said. “So myself and the whole senior leadership, we understand this concern around staffing and where it comes from. We just think the problem is misunderstood.”
But Tregoning said health care workers’ concerns are closely tied to quality of patient care.
“We need a little more give and take,” she said. “As caregivers we don’t really have any ulterior motive here.
“We’re Swedish patients too. Our families go there, we go there, they are us and we are them.”
