Once upon a time, Women & Infants Hospital paid for its workers to take customer service training courses at Disney World.
Justine Iadeluca — a C-section recovery room nurse who’s worked at the hospital for 23 years — recalled attending one of those employer-paid trips to Florida. But those days are over, Idaeluca said as she stood outside her workplace Wednesday morning.
“It is now an antagonistic relationship,” Iadeluca said of the increasing acrimony between the hospital’s unionized workers, represented by SEIU 1199 NE, and the hospital’s owner, Care New England.
Iadeluca and other Women & Infants workers held a one-day informational picket outside the hospital Wednesday to decry what the union calls management’s “illegal tactics against workers at the expense of patient care.” The union said eight worker layoffs were announced in the days leading up to the informational picket’s 10 a.m. start, all people who work in medical records and coding in the hospital’s oncology department. This week’s layoffs follow a batch of nine at the hospital announced on May 15 — the same day a strike began at Care New England’s psychiatric holding, Butler Hospital.
“Every time that we have any kind of action, we let them know they’re having a picket, they lay people off,” Iadeluca said. “Any time the union takes steps up, there’s retaliation by the hospital. We are here to let the community know that there are inherent problems here within Care New England.”
The Women & Infants workers were joined on the picket line by their Butler colleagues, who have been striking for 69 days — the longest hospital strike in the Ocean State’s history, according to the union. The labor stoppage has proven impervious to resolution so far, with multiple meetings between the union and management producing little movement toward an agreement, even with the presence of multiple federal negotiators in the proceedings since May.
The approximately 1,800 unionized frontline staff at Women & Infants are not on strike like Butler workers, but they feel similarly mistreated by Care New England, Iadeluca said. Women & Infants staff secured a new contract last December, staving off a potential strike. But Iadeluca described it as a “tentative agreement.”
“It’s like they’re not following the contract,” she said. “We run short-staffed. We’re entitled to breaks. They know we’re short-staffed, they know we’re not going to get breaks, and they know that if we don’t get breaks, they’re not gonna pay us for those breaks.”
A summer of fallout
Hillary Lima, a spokesperson for Care New England who works for the external firm Half Street Group, disputed the number of workers laid off this week in a Wednesday evening email. There are more than 2,000 non-medical employees at Women & Infants, she said, and the hospital eliminated seven positions this week.
“These layoffs don’t take effect until October, when the employees will have the option to seek other comparable positions at the Hospital,” Lima wrote. “To date, only a single union employee has taken a layoff under the most recent negotiated contract.”
Lima added, “SEIU’s charged rhetoric and tactics of disruption are putting unnecessary strain on the state’s health care system. Their paid, professional organizers and lobbyists are putting politics ahead of patients.”
The ties that bind the two hospitals have been emphasized by Care New England in recent weeks, as the hospital system has fortified its public-facing response to the ongoing Butler scuffle. Besides radio ads and updates on its website, the health system has hired the PR firm ofMike Raia — once the top spokesperson for former Gov. Gina Raimondo. Now the president of Half Street Group, Raia said in a July 16 email that the firm will “provide additional bandwidth for media and external relations” for Butler amid the strike.
Previously, Care New England’s internal communications team was handling all Butler-related inquiries. Raia did not divulge specifics about his firm’s relationship with Butler when pressed for additional details about the contract’s scope, expense or start date.
More expressive was a Monday press release from Raia in which he wrote that “SEIU’s ongoing strike has never been about Butler, its employees, or its patients: It’s been a political power move by professional political leaders that has regrettably and unconscionably put an unnecessary strain on Rhode Island’s health care system.”
Raia’s news release described Butler’s “last, best and final” proposal from July 11 as a “fair and market-leading offer” with “double-digit” wage increases, pension protections, $0 premium health plans, and more perks. He also cited the Butler proposal as potentially better than the one struck last week between Rhode Island Hospital and its unionized workers.
The union announced its rejection of Butler’s July 11 proposal on Monday. A July 17 phone interview with union delegate Virgil Soares suggested the union did not view the proposal in the same favorable terms.
“It’s kind of an ultimatum instead of a proposal,” said Soares, who has been on the negotiating committee twice before.
Soares has worked in the Butler’s dietary department for nearly 30 years, overseeing a team of cooks and managing meal plans for patients. For the past two months, he’s continued that culinary work as food manager for the ongoing strike, keeping the picket line hydrated and fed. He too said he’s noticed changes in his decades at Butler.
“It just turned so corporate, and it’s a totally different feeling,” Soares said. “The lowest paid workers feel like the lowest paid people.”
Raia, the union’s “indefinite labor strike” led Butler to “shut down roughly 70 beds,” although he did not divulge more details about how patients were affected.
The hospital system has also taken legal action against the state’s labor department, which ruled in June that striking Butler workers had been “locked out” and were therefore eligible for unemployment benefits retroactively from June 1 onward. Butler asked both the Rhode Island Supreme and Superior Courts to block the department’s decision, but a justice denied its motion for a stay on July 10. The Supreme Court will hold a conference on Sept. 4 to determine if it will hear Butler’s case or let the department’s decision stand.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
