When NUHW’s 600 members at Sutter California Pacific Medical Center bargained their last contract, they accounted for nearly every Sutter employee in the union.
Now, after several years of strong organizing drives, the San Francisco hospital workers will be returning to the bargaining table alongside 600 additional Sutter workers, who joined NUHW over the past three years.
With NUHW’s Sutter membership having doubled since the start of 2023, Sutter workers are beginning to determine what they want to win in upcoming bargaining and how they can work together to achieve their goals.
“It’s an exciting opportunity,” said Maricar Trinidad, a Certified Nursing Assistant at Sutter CPMC’s Davies campus. “We can take more powerful actions, we fight for the same priorities. It definitely feels like we’re bigger and stronger than ever before.”
For years, the only Sutter unit in NUHW besides CPMC in San Francisco was the Sutter Visiting Nurses Association in Santa Cruz. But in 2023 and 2024, NUHW organized 180 workers at the Sutter Center for Psychiatry in Sacramento and more than 400 workers at Sutter Care at Home offices in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Sacramento counties.
Sutter, a notoriously anti-union company that recorded a $1 billion net profit last year, thought it could steamroll the new union members by making them pay for a health plan whose premiums had always been free.
The company soon realized it was dealing with workers who wouldn’t tolerate that kind of takeaway. After multiple strikes at the Sacramento hospital and actions by home health workers, Sutter agreed to a two-year agreement that preserved a fully employer-paid health care option.
“It was a positive experience and I learned a lot,” said Stephanie Smith, an RN Case Manager at Sutter Hospice Sacramento, who had never been in a union before. “It gives you confidence in how to make change.”
Smith expects Sutter to be back on the table and is looking forward to fighting off any takeaways again with all of her fellow NUHW members at Sutter.
“It always comes down to having more power with more people standing up to them at the same time,” she said.
Workers are still filling out bargaining surveys to determine what they will seek in negotiations, but they want to do more than hold the line on health care.
“We still are understaffed and overworked, and that’s because we need to make more to ensure that patients can recover in a safely staffed facility,” said Purnell Nesmith, a patient care support specialist at the Sutter Center for Psychiatry in Sacramento.
Understaffing and inadequate wages are a big issue throughout the system.
Smith, the hospice worker who drives throughout Sacramento visiting patients at their homes, said managers call off workers when the patient count drops but never add workers when the patient census surges, often loading them with more cases.
“We suggested there should be a range of between 12-16 patients (at the highest, I’ve had 20 patients in my list),” Smith said. “There’s no way for me to see all these patients and be familiar with their cases and provide the care they need.”
