Hospital Workers, Facing Layoffs, Launch Counterattack On Executives

Good for this group of employees that took a stand for themselves. They are not going to allow themselves to be taken advantage of by the Executives at the hospital. I hope to see more of this type of protest.

In recent months, the management at Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System has approached workers with a set of proposals that include layoffs and cuts to pensions and health benefits. In doing so, the administration at the publicly funded Monterey County, Calif., hospital has asked its workers to make concessions typical of this budget-tightening era.

But rather than roll over, the union of nurses, technicians and other hospital workers has rejected management’s proposal, instead launching a counter attack on the executives themselves. The hospital's top officials now face a firestorm in the local media and an audit from the state of California. The layoffs and benefit cuts are, at least for now, on hold.

It's a sharp break from the national labor playbook. From Maine to California, unions have been negotiating just how deep the concessions they'll give to management will be. Even in Wisconsin, public workers immediately accepted drastic cuts to pay, pensions and health care, drawing the line only at the right to collectively bargain. In Washington, D.C., Democrats have similarly capitulated to GOP demands for major cuts in social spending under reasoning succinctly laid out by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio): "We're broke."

The Salinas hospital workers' response, in essence, serves as a rebuttal: No, you're not broke. And we can prove it.

“All these other unions have just been accepting these takeaways and bargaining over the extent of the concessions they’ve already conceded,” said Leighton Woodhouse, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), the union representing Salinas employees. “It’s just been a negotiation over the sacrifice of their own members...except here in Salinas.”

According to Woodhouse, the union’s research into executive pay at Salinas uncovered the fact that the hospital’s outgoing CEO, Sam Downing, will receive a nearly $4 million payout, most of it in so-called “supplemental” pensions, in addition to his normal annual pension of $150,000. Woodhouse said the union took its finding to the L.A. Times, which ran an expose on April 28. (The reporter who wrote the story would not confirm that the NUHW had supplied the figures, noting that, like most newspapers, it does not reveal sources.)

In the wake of the news, California's state assembly held a well publicized hearing on the executive pensions and voted to perform an audit of the hospital.

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