One year after forming a union, nearly 400 workers at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital hit the streets for the first time this month, holding an informational picket as they fight for a contract that provides safe staffing levels and fair wages and benefits.
“Our families have to come here too, so we want proper staffing,” Noemi Galvan, an imaging technician at the hospital, told KTLA-5, which covered the picket along with KABC radio and the Glendale News Press. The lack of proper staffing, she added, “trickles down the system… and it ultimately ends up affecting patient care.”
Community leaders, including Assemblymember Nick Schultz and Glendale Teachers Association President Taline Arsenian, joined the workers on the picket lines.
There is strong community support for the workers at the Glendale hospital, which USC purchased in 2013, pledging to bring world-class care. However, it just recently closed both the birthing center and the neonatal intensive care unit. At the same time, staffing shortages are worsening, with nursing assistants now being ordered to care for up to 14 patients per shift.
“We’re facing a short-staffing crisis, and USC’s answer has been to make us treat more patients while cutting services,” said Ricardo Ramirez De La Rosa, a nursing assistant at the hospital. “The demands being placed on us as caregivers are not sustainable, and the university’s stance in contract bargaining would only make things worse.”
As conditions worsened in the hospital, nearly 400 workers, including licensed vocational nurses, nursing assistants, medical technicians,, and respiratory therapists, voted to join NUHW last December. So far, the university has refused to accept their proposals to ensure safe staffing and the same benefits and job protections that the more than 2,000 NUHW members at other Keck-USC hospitals already receive.
The December 10 picket was the workers’ first major public action, but it won’t be the last if USC doesn’t start making compromises at the bargaining table.
“It was so great to see so many of my coworkers standing together, demanding fair treatment for patients and each other,” said Didi Sabino, who admits patients in the hospital’s emergency room. “We’ve grown so much stronger over the last year, and we’re ready to build on this action to make USC respect our work and the patients we serve.”
