The stakes couldn’t be higher for a solution to the current nurses’ labor dispute to be found. Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children, with a mission critical to Hawaii families’ health, has been turned upside-down in a contract dispute that has languished without resolution for more than a year.
Unfortunately, the stalemate erupted into full-blown hostilities after the Hawaii Nurses Association held a one-day strike Sept. 13. Seeking to compel an agreement, Kapi‘olani imposed a lockout against the nurses who had joined the picket line.
It’s plain that the professional intervention of a federal mediator is needed to put negotiations back on a productive path. The nurses have been working without a contract since December.
Conflict culminated in a protest Monday in which 10 union members and sympathizers were arrested after they sat down to obstruct the hospital’s main driveway, intending to block entry by travel nurses hired to replace regular staff.
Among those arrested were newly elected state Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto, Democratic candidate for state House Ikaika Hussey and John Witeck of the Hawaii Workers Center.
No hospital would find blocking access to care acceptable.
The managers, for their part, have drawn some reasonable objections for the lockout against nurses, who now have been told they soon will lose their medical benefits if they fail to negotiate in good faith with a mediator and continue to disrupt hospital operations. The HNA and its affiliated Office and Professional Employees International Union have asked for an injunction from the National Labor Relations Board to end a lockout that unions see as an unfair labor practice.
A ruling to settle that issue is needed urgently.
In the meantime, Gov. Josh Green and state Attorney Genera Anne Lopez rightly have weighed in, pressing both the union and medical center management, in phone calls and letters, to seek federal mediation to achieve a compromise. That’s going to take some doing, given that labor and management interactions have now been interspersed with protesters’ chants of “Scabs go home!” aimed at the travel nurses.
The governor presented the parties with the ultimate reality check: They are going to be working together in the end, and the longer the caustic, confrontational rhetoric continues, he said, the more difficult it becomes to heal scars produced in the battle.
The temperature must be brought down. Both sides will have to acknowledge the difficulties faced on the opposite side of the negotiating table — and both will have to yield some items on their own wish lists. A mediator will have the temperament to discern a middle path.
Among the union members’ complaints is a nurse-to-patient ratio that they say is unsafe. The ratio must be reduced so that patients get adequate care, they have said.
In an encouraging development, Gidget Ruscetta, the hospital’s chief operating officer, has said Kapi‘olani is working on a “staffing matrix” that could address these concerns. In the interest of patient quality care, an offer that can fix this shortcoming should be made a top priority.
Pay scales will need to be negotiated to settle on an improvement that the hospital can sustain, and a mediator can help to find a route to that accord.
But other failings can be rectified now, as Green said, by the parties sitting across the table simply showing some aloha and engaging in calm dialogue. The disruptive behavior of a strike surely affects the current patients, in need of healing. Some consideration of that simple fact is called for.
The goal remains what it always should have been: achieving a settlement, without delay, while maintaining the goodwill of the community that this crucial medical center serves.
