Butler Hospital has raised the stakes in its standoff with unionized employees, announcing plans to hire permanent replacements for about 800 workers in their third week of a strike.
But filling all those open positions with permanent hires at the psychiatric hospital on Providence’s East Side will be tough, labor experts said, given hospital staffing shortages and competition for health care workers in neighboring states.
In Massachusetts and Connecticut, hospitals can pay 20% to 30% more for health care staff than hospitals in Rhode Island, said Howard Dulude, interim president of the Hospital Association Rhode Island, or HARI.
“We have a lot of great people working in our hospitals and [in] health care who choose to stay here,’’ Dulude said, “but it does make it more difficult to [recruit] and retain people.”
Rhode Island’s pay and benefits packages for hospitals’ non-medical staff, Dulude said, tend to be “very competitive” with similar low-wage jobs in other industries. But hospitals also are competing for workers with employers in numerous other industries, from big retail chains like Home Depot to banks. And hospitals operate 24/7 so they need to fill openings on the night shift too, he said, which is also a struggle.
Butler Hospital had posted more than 400 job openings, including 136 for nurses, on the Care New England website as of Wednesday. It’s unclear whether the openings include the additional permanent jobs that were held by the strikers.
If hospitals already were having a hard time filling openings, it’s even harder to do during a strike, said Michael J. Yelnosky, professor of law at Roger Williams University School of Law.
Hiring permanent replacements is “a weapon that can break strikes,” he said, “but [it] doesn’t come without cost to the employer.’’
Finding permanent replacements “sounds easier than it is,’’ Yelnosky said. “Notwithstanding the fact that there might be workers who want those jobs,’’ some workers are “not going to apply for them, because they have to cross picket lines.”
Federal law, he said, requires a hospital to pay any permanent replacements the same wages and benefits that striking members of the union turned down in the hospital’s last offer.
And once the hospital and the union settle the strike, Yelnowsky said, the hospital might allow the striking workers to return to their jobs. “So the so-called permanent replacements,’’ he said, “aren’t really permanent.”
But if Butler Hospital’s top executive has any doubts whether the hospital can replace its striking workers, she has not let on in her public statements.
“Striking employees who have been permanently replaced will not return to work once the strike ends,’’ Mary E. Marran, Butler’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement Tuesday announcing the plan. “Instead, those employees will be placed on a preferential hire list and will be able to return once a position becomes available.”
She said the hospital would “welcome employees back to work at any time.”
On Wednesday, in a separate statement responding to media inquiries, Marran confirmed that some of the striking workers had crossed the picket line “to return to work at Butler Hospital.” And other workers, she said, “have reached out to discuss the possibility of returning.”
It’s unclear how many strikers have crossed the picket line to return to work. Neither the hospital nor the union responded Wednesday to requests for numbers.
Federal law prohibits striking workers from being permanently replaced if the strike is to protest an unfair labor practice committed by their employer. But if the strike’s objective is higher wages or better working conditions, the law says, the workers are considered “economic strikers,” and can be replaced by their employer.
At the start of the strike for better wages and working conditions, the SEIU 1199 New England, which represents the striking Butler workers, on May 16 filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the hospital, alleging refusal to bargain in good faith. The National Labor Relations Board would have to rule on that complaint to determine whether the strike met that definition under the law. And that could take some time.
Butler’s strike is already among the longest in Rhode Island in the last decade, and one of the longest in the industry nationwide. Nearly 80% of the labor strikes in the country’s health care and social assistance industry since 2015 have lasted seven days or less, according to the Labor Action Tracker run by Cornell University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
A war of attrition normally favors employers in extended strikes, labor experts said, because they usually have deeper pockets than their workers.
But Jesse Martin, executive vice president of SEIU1199 NE, said his union members routinely work two or more jobs to make ends meet, and many are picking up extra shifts at nursing homes or other health care facilities during the strike.
“We believe that if we’re prepared to strike, that we should be prepared to strike until we win,’’ Martin said. “That is a fundamentally different approach than most other unions in health care.’’
He points to a nine-month strike he ran for the union at five nursing homes in Connecticut starting in July 2012. Martin describes the strike as a win for the union.
“Even on our nine month strike in Connecticut,’’ Martin said, “no worker lost their home, lost their car, their ability to provide for their family.’’
A federal judge in Hartford, Conn. in December 2012 ordered the nursing homes to reinstate some 600 striking workers. And last year, an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ordered the Connecticut nursing homes to compensate those workers for lost wages and benefits.
