Every NUHW member who works at a Northern California Providence hospital has at least one thing in common — they’re in high-stakes contract negotiations with a company that is single-mindedly focused on cutting services in their communities and paying them as little as possible.
Providence’s gameplan is divide and conquer. But NUHW members who work for Providence in Sonoma, Napa and Humboldt counties have never been more united.
This month, more than 75% percent of the workers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, Petaluma Valley Hospital, Queen of the Valley Medical Center, Redwood Memorial Hospital and St. Joseph Eureka along with their brethren who provide hospice and homecare for Providence signed their first-ever unity petition.
The document declares that all workers will “stand together across Northern California and take action to win a fair contract that protects our patients, invests in our communities and provides us with the dignity we deserve as essential healthcare workers.”
Shannon Signer, a Rad Tech who circulated the petition among her colleagues at Santa Rosa Memorial, said people were eager to sign. “Providence isn’t trying to hide its bad intentions,” she said. “It has billions of dollars in reserves, but it keeps cutting services and making it harder for us to serve patients.”
Providence became a major healthcare operator in Northern California when it took over St. Joseph Health a decade ago. The “merger” was framed as an opportunity to expand services, but in recent years Providence has laid off workers and slashed services throughout the region.
Since the start of the pandemic, Providence has shuttered two birthing centers, closed its outpatient labs, announced the closure of the only acute care rehabilitation center in Humboldt County and is now moving to close a second urgent care center in Sonoma County.
“Providence is single-minded in its pursuit of profit, so we have to be single minded in our pursuit of contracts that protect us as workers and safeguard medical care in our communities,” said Carmel Papworth-Barbnum, a social worker at Providence Hospice in Sonoma County.
Unity among NUHW’s nearly 2,300 Northern California Providence workers started long before they began circulating the petition.
Last year, NUHW members at Providence hospitals in Northern California joined with their union siblings at Hospice of Sonoma County to form a Coordinated Bargaining Council. Members of the council have traveled hundreds of miles to attend bargaining sessions at other Providence hospitals, eliciting angry responses from company lawyers, who want to keep workers apart.
The Coordinated Bargaining Council has grown stronger in recent weeks with newly organized professional workers at St. Joseph Eureka and Santa Rosa Memorial hospitals joining it and bargaining single contracts with coworkers at their hospitals.
While workers are likely to bargain individual separate contracts, they are already winning common standards. There have been enforceable limits in shift cancellations at every Providence hospital except Queen of the Valley in Napa, but months into negotiations, the company has agreed to at least extend the common standard to Queen.
“We’re trying to raise all the standards,” said XXX, a XXXX and XXXX, who sits on the coordinated bargaining committee. “We want better protections to prevent subcontracting our jobs, better protections for seniority and better protections against unjust discipline. For every standard, we’re taking the best contractual language we have — in some cases strengthening it —and moving to make it the standard across the region.”
Providence workers are also trying to set a new standard when it comes to salaries and health benefits. Providence has been content to pay less than its local competitors in the Bay Area, resulting in high turnover and chronic understaffing that impacts care. The council is rolling out proposals that would catch workers up to what competitors like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health pay, as well as fully-employer-paid health coverage.
“We know Providence is not going to like what we’re proposing,” said XXXX, who works as a xxxx at xxxxx. “But we also know that Providence can absolutely afford to pay this, and we know that the more unity we show as workers and the more unity we build in our communities, the harder it will be for Providence to ignore our needs and the needs of our friends, neighbors and patients.”
