STANFORD UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL: Nurses Plan To Strike

      Nurses at Stanford University Hospital and Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital Tuesday "served a legally required 10-day notice of intent to strike on June 11, unless an agreement can be reached before then," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The nurses, "who have been negotiating a new contract with the hospitals since mid-April, are seeking a 12% pay increase over two years." The hospitals had been offering a 1% raise for a one-year contract, but just "[h]ours before the strike vote ... increased the offer to 6% over two years." But the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement, a small independent union, "voted 1,410 to 43 on Monday to authorize a strike."

Since The Merger
      The Chronicle reports that the "strike threat is the first sign of labor unrest at the Stanford hospitals since they merged in November with the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco and Mount Zion Hospital to form a private, nonprofit corporation, UCSF Stanford Health Care." Although Stanford nurses "are among the highest paid in the Bay Area ... they are seeking a wage increase that would keep pace with the Bay Area's cost of living index." One nurse said, "The employer has become this big corporation that doesn't want to give us a cost-of-living raise." But Felix Barthelemy, the hospitals' vice president for human resources, "said Stanford has historically sought to be competitive on nurses' wages." He said, "We made no attempt to freeze or cut wages going into the negotiations." The Chronicle reports that both groups "vowed yesterday to continue to negotiate up to the strike deadline to reach an agreement" (Workman, 6/4).