Healthcare Workers Unite: Beginning on Wednesday, about 1,800 health care workers at four Prime Healthcare sites in Southern California will go on strike for seven days over the Christmas break.
The upcoming strike is the second one in a short amount of time at Prime Healthcare locations in the area. In October, the first one, the same group of workers, led by SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, went on strike for five days.
Healthcare Workers Unite: Four Prime Facilities in SoCal Set to Strike on Wednesda
This time, Prime St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Prime Centinela Medical Center in Inglewood, Prime Garden Grove Hospital Medical Center, and Prime Encino Medical Center are the hospitals that are being bombed.
From Wednesday to Friday, from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., there will be picket lines every day. Even though there won’t be any lines after Friday, SEIU says the strike will last until the 27th of December, when workers will return to work.
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Prime Healthcare said in a statement that the Ontario, California-based business is still in talks with SEIU.
The company said, “The hospital has sent proposals to the union that would raise wages, offer a good health care plan, keep important benefits, and make the hospital competitive with other hospitals in the market.” Although progress had been made, it is upsetting that the union has quit the talks and gone on strike. However, this will not change our promise to provide excellent patient care to our communities over the holidays and always.
The workers’ union says the strike is happening “after months of trying to address the facilities’ long-standing issues of understaffing, worker turnover, and patient care concerns at the bargaining table.”
If SEIU tries to negotiate, it says it is met with bad faith and other unfair labor tactics.
Health care workers have been threatened and tried to be silenced for months for speaking out about poor patient care and a lack of staff at their hospitals, said Dolores Aguilar, a unit secretary at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood.
“We are worn out and overworked, and it’s hard for us to give good care,” she said. “We are going on strike again because Prime executives are not being fair in negotiations and won’t listen to our concerns about the safety of workers and patients.”
SEIU says that Aguilar is one of four main health care workers who were fired from the medical center just days after protesting at Prime Healthcare’s offices in Ontario about a lack of staff and poor patient care conditions.
The union said that many frontline health care workers are on strike, such as emergency room technicians, licensed vocational nurses, certified nursing assistants, imaging technicians, medical assistants, breathing technicians, and more.
Prime Healthcare said that the hospitals would stay open even though there is a strike.
