A large crowd of locked-out union nurses from Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children showed up at the state Capitol on Tuesday morning to demonstrate their plight, and asking to see Gov. Josh Green.
They joined hands for a prayer at the Capitol Rotunda, then lined up along South Beretania Street, some with kids and dogs in strollers, to wave signs seeking public support.
“What do we want? Safe staffing. When do we want it? Now,” they chanted in a call-and-response format. “Who’s got the power? We’ve got the power.”
A delegate from the Hawaii Nurses’ Association, which represents about 600 Kapi‘olani nurses, went to Green’s office to deliver a letter as well as to speak with him. Hundreds of nurses gathered in the rotunda chanting, “Show your face!” but did not see the governor Tuesday morning.
“Governor was a no-show,” said HNA President Rosalee Agas-Yuu. “They said he was busy.”
HNA wants the governor to intervene in what it calls a public health emergency, and has launched an online petition asking him to show business leaders such lockouts have no place in Hawaii.
On Monday, Green issued a statement, alongside the state attorney general, saying he is more than willing to mediate if both sides request his help but that he cannot legally intervene in private labor negotiations between the nurses union and Kapi‘olani.
The Office of the Governor said Green’s schedule is booked weeks in advance and that the group did not have an appointment. After a dental appointment Tuesday morning, Green went to a previously scheduled executive meeting.
The nurses then marched to the headquarters of Hawaii Pacific Health, the parent corporation of Kapi‘olani, at Harbor Court downtown, seeking to speak with its CEO and president, Ray Vara, whom they said has not yet met with them.
Escalating tensions
Tensions between HNA and Kapi‘olani have risen since the former held a one-day strike Friday and the latter locked the nurses out Saturday.
Kapi‘olani management has said the lockout prohibiting HNA-represented nurses from returning to work will remain in place until the latest contract offer is unconditionally accepted. Kapi‘olani, meanwhile, has hired a temporary workforce to fully staff the hospital during the labor dispute.
Kapi‘olani Chief Operating Officer Gidget Ruscetta has said the lockout is an effort to encourage HNA to accept its offer after more than 30 negotiating sessions, and six sessions with a federal mediator. She also said HNA has never taken its offer to its members for a ratification vote.
“A lockout is the employers’ right under the law to prevent workers from returning to work in order to convince the union to accept the agreement that is on the table,” she had said at a news conference.
On Tuesday, Ruscetta said Kapi‘olani’s focus is on its patients and that the hospital continues to provide uninterrupted care for the community.
“We will go into these talks with the same goal we have had since we started negotiations more than a year ago — to reach an agreement for our nurses,” said Ruscetta in an emailed statement.
The two parties have agreed to meet Thursday for another bargaining session.
Kapi‘olani nurses are advocating for safe staffing, HNA said, with limits on how many patients a nurse can safely be assigned during a shift, which is part a movement by other nurses unions across the U.S.
Kapi‘olani nurses also want better working conditions, without mandatory overtime and without bullying or retaliation for expressing these concerns, HNA said. They are rallying for this even with unemployment on the line, and the loss of employer-provided health care starting in October.
Agas-Yuu said 500 to 600 nurses will file for unemployment insurance as a result of Kapi‘olani’s lockout decision, and will apply for federal health care coverage under COBRA for themselves and their family in October.
Lockouts in isle history
Union members say an indefinite lockout is an unusual move in recent Hawaii history.
Stakes have risen as fellow nurses and union members join the Kapi‘olani nurses in what they now see as an unprecedented workers’ battle for all hospitals statewide.
“It is an offense to all workers across the state,” said Kim Coco Iwamoto, who will represent House District 25 in the next legislative session.
Iwamoto said she joined the march to thank the nurses “for standing in solidarity with Hawaii’s mothers and children.”
“When there’s short staffing, it increases the risk of harm,” she said. “It’s tragic when those kinds of errors and that kind of negligence can be avoided if we just had sufficient staffing.”
HNA maintains the Friday strike was over unfair labor practices and retaliation of nurses filling out safe- staffing forms documenting these instances. HNA has filed an injunction, which is still pending.
Agas-Yuu said in a news release that Kapi‘olani nurses care about their patients and know families are concerned about quality of care at the hospital right now.
“We have always given our all for our patients,” she said in the release, “but now the hospital has created an ethical dilemma for the nurses: the only way we can continue to provide care for our patients is to agree to a contract that sanctions and institutionalizes a lower standard of patient care and puts our professional licenses in jeopardy.”
There are four documented lockouts in Hawaii since 1948, mainly over wage disputes in the construction industry, according to the University of Hawaii Center for Labor Education and Research.
According to a 1984 Honolulu Star-Bulletin story, contractors locked out striking concrete workers at least eight weeks.
Daniel Ross, former HNA president and Queen’s Medical Center nurse, recalls a brief lockout at Queen’s following a strike about 20 years ago. At that time, Queen’s said it was phasing out traveling nurses for a few more days, which was a reasonable explanation, he said.
An indefinite lockout until a contract is unconditionally accepted, however, is an attempt at union busting, he said.
He said Queen’s nurses also seek nurse-to-patient ratios in their contract, which HNA is also negotiating, but that management refuses to discuss the ratios.
