OPEN BARGAINING WENT GREAT!

4/11/2024

Congratulations to our nurses for holding our first ever Open Bargaining session! There were more than 50 nurses in the room in addition to our bargaining team. We made history today. We are proud of the work being done by the nurses working within SFDPH to build the strength and power that will secure improvements to staffing and patient care conditions. 

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Oral statements were given by 17 nurses and 10 nurses submitted written statements in advance. Nurses throughout the entire SFDPH network told compelling, sad, and at times enraging stories about their experiences working short staffed. We heard from an anesthetist who described an overuse of mandatory overtime so severe that CRNA’s are forced to work to their 16 hour legal limit often. An ED educator who runs new hire training and has counted 104 nurses hired and 97 separated since 2022. Inpatient psych where the nurse manager was assaulted and has been out for months. 

 

Med surg nurses borrowing supplies and staffing to cover patient care needs on H58, an entire unit that has no independent budgeting. An ICU charge nurse who talked through a recent mass casualty event and having to manage the crisis with inadequately experienced staff because the units were primarily staffed by travelers. Nurses talked about hallucinating from exhaustion, having multiple UTIs, being worried about making mistakes and providing unsafe care due to a lack of breaks, mandatory overtime causing people to be exhausted and suffer moral injury.

 

The city’s management team and chief negotiator listened well. They also attempted to intimidate and silence people by asking for multiple speakers to say and spell their names. If you or anyone who spoke today are contacted by a manager or HR staff member, do NOT speak with them. That is considered “direct dealing” and is illegal during this period of contract negotiations. The city management and HR team are aware that they should be working with our bargaining team, union reps and shop stewards, please redirect them back to us. As a reminder, participation in union activity is considered “protected concerted activity,” meaning retaliation by management is illegal.