Organizing campaign takes concerns to community

“Each day I go to work, I know there is a good chance that we will be short-staffed,” said Linda Boly, a registered nurse at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Ore. Boly was one of 11 nurses from the Legacy Health System who testified in late May at a Workers’ Rights Board hearing on safe staffing.

AFT Healthcare has been working to organize the nurses in the Legacy hospital system for two years. In their quest for a union, members of the United Nurses of Legacy reached out to the community to air concerns about staffing in their hospitals. More than 350 labor and community supporters joined the Legacy nurses at the Workers’ Rights Board hearing. The board, which includes representatives of nonprofit organizations and clergy from the Portland area, was organized by Portland Jobs with Justice.

Annie Berger, a medical surgical nurse at Legacy Meridian Park Hospital, believes staffing ratios are absolutely essential to improving the quality of patient care. “It is neither uncommon nor unexpected that day-shift nurses will care for five acutely ill patients at one time,” even though the nursing supervisor knows it’s wrong, said Berger. “Our staffing matrix seems to change with the budget,” not the condition of the patient.

“Inadequate staffing endangers my patients needing one-to-one care and endangers my nursing license,” said Leanne Park, telemetry nurse at Legacy Emanuel Hospital. “I am faced with an impossible decision: Which patient deserves my nursing care?” said Park. “Collective bargaining would offer Legacy nurses the opportunity to be involved in decisions affecting patient care.”

Veteran nurse Toren Brolutti left the Legacy system to work for a unionized Kaiser facility. At Legacy, “benefits eroded every year, wages fell further and further behind the rest of the community, and—hardest of all for the nurses to take—staffing practices continued to erode,” said Brolutti. The final straw came two years ago when Brolutti sustained a back injury after being forced to work a 12-hour shift without a break. “Realizing I could not return to a working environment of compromised patient care and long hours without breaks, I successfully landed a job at Kaiser.”

Kathleen Sharp, a labor and delivery nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital, says a union can and will make a difference in the practice of safe patient care. “We can protect the patients and the nurses while promoting the best practices as standard,” said Sharp.

David Rohr, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Legacy Emanuel Hospital, asked community members to support the nurses’ organization efforts to ensure adequate staffing and secure a legal contract between the nurses and hospital adminstration.

As a result of the hearing, board members plan to meet with Legacy CEO Lee Domanico to urge him to adopt safe staffing ratios throughout all Legacy hospitals, with nurse participation and endorsement, and to ensure nurses have the opportunity to seek union representation, with Legacy pledging to remain neutral during the election. The board also will advocate for state legislation in support of safe staffing ratios. The nurses also collected more than 1,000 signatures in support of safe-staffing legislation that was recently introduced in the state Legislature.