CNA, SEIU Protest Tenet's Cutting Of Sick Leave For Health Care Workers

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/11574

By Doug Cunningham

At nine hospitals in Florida and California on Tuesday nurses and hospital workers represented by the California Nurses Association and SEIU protested the Tenet corporation’s cutting of sick leave.

Health care workers will need their sick leave if the H1N1 flu virus strikes hard in coming months. Sherri Stoddard is an RN with the CNA in San Luis Obispo.

: “You want your nurses to be able to take their sick leave and not come to work sick. We want to be able to protect our patients and we want to come to work well. And you know, healthy nurses, healthy patients.We're trying to make the patients and the local publics aware of what's going on. They're usually pretty supportive of their health care workers. Throughout these different facilities we're making the public aware and asking the public to actually call to encourage Tenet to give us back the cuts that they have made."

[47of74]

1. As usual

Corporations treat the front line health care workers like they are beneath contempt.

[tavalon]

2. I've got one better for you

I was sick a number of times this winter. Because I am a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit, I don't want to expose my tiny little patients. My manager wrote me up for excessive sick days taken. I asked her what she expected me to do differently. She said, "don't get sick as often.". I kid you not. That woman is a perfect fit for middle management.

[cap]

4. I can top you: my husband's nurse came into work with a 103 degree fever

in one of our country's leading hospitals.

Great...

[tavalon]

5. And she did it because the hospital culture pushes for nurses to be self sacrificing that way

But anyone who thinks for two minutes on their own realizes that it isn't just the nurse being self sacrificing, she (or occasionally he) is putting her patients and fellow coworkers at risk. Since most nurses are terribly codependent, framing it the way I just did helps nurses to do the right thing. There is nothing to be done to help middle management, IMO, they are just dumb to the bone.

The only thing that keeps me loving nursing is my patients. The hospital culture is horrible, top down. And I worked for years as a travel nurse, so I've seen a lot of hospital cultures and haven't found a supportive one yet.

[fasttense]

3. These health care corporations are not in the business of health care

They are in the business of making a huge profit. Instead of focusing on how to do a better job of taking care of their patients they figure out ways to short cut the care they offer in order to make more money and profit.

They should go to Wall Street or become bankers since all they want are profits.