Deal to delay California hospital seismic standards falls apart as union, employers split
The California Hospital Association scuttled a deal that would have imposed minimum pay of $25 an hour for many of the state’s health care workers in exchange for delaying mandated 2030 seismic requirements for hospitals, according to a powerful labor union that had been negotiating the deal.
Leaders of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West said the hospital industry group nixed the deal because the union would not agree to a loophole that would have allowed hospitals to outsource jobs or move work to other facilities.
Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokeswoman for the hospital association, said the two sides weren’t able to conclude terms in the allotted time.
“These are both big, important issues that must be addressed,” she said, “but with the end of the legislative session only a week away, we just simply ran out of time this year.”
In an internal memo obtained by The Bee, California Hospital Association President Carmela Coyle and board chair Sarah Krevans told members that the board had tried to negotiate a deal with labor that would delay seismic retrofit standards expected to cost more than $100 billion. The hospital group had been unable to get California legislators to support a delay without labor’s support, they said.
Noting that powerful labor groups were campaigning for a minimum wage for health care, the hospital association’s board of trustees agreed to look at whether it could collaborate with SEIU-UHW to secure a deal that would benefit hospital operators and health care workers, according to the memo.
SEIU-UHW had been successful at getting local initiatives or ordinances adopted in Southern California that created a $25-an-hour minimum wage, and it was taking its campaign to other localities and planning a statewide initiative on the issue.
If the union was able to get a proposition on the statewide ballot, that whole process could place “substantial restrictions on hospitals’ ability to make necessary fiscally responsible changes,” Krevans and Coyle wrote in the memo.
By compromising on a legislative proposal, however, hospital association would have the opportunity to work on dampening the financial impact of both the wage increases and the seismic retrofits.
Negotiations stalled, a union news release and the internal hospital association document noted, as both sides grew concerned that the gains they wanted to achieve were being eroded.
While SEIU-UHW had fought for the deal, seven other powerful labor groups, including the California Nurses Association and the California Teamsters Public Affairs Council, had sent letters to state leaders strongly opposing the proposals to restrict the number of buildings that would require seismic updates and to put off the retrofit deadline until 2037.
SEIU-UHW did not slow down despite the setback on the deal with the hospital association. Roughly 200 members of the union are pressing state legislators on Tuesday and Wednesday to enact a statewide minimum wage for California’s health care industry.
“There is a broad understanding that it was frontline healthcare workers, not greedy hospital executives, who put their lives on the line and continue to carry California through the COVID crisis,” said said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW. “We are calling on every city in the state to pass a local ordinance establishing a $25 minimum wage immediately. We are calling on the legislature and, if necessary, the state’s voters to establish a $25 minimum wage within the year.”
The union has said the minimum wage will draw more workers to institutions that are often short-staffed. Members point to a recent survey of 30,000-plus SEIU-UHW members in which 83% reported that their facility is understaffed and as many as 20% said they have considered leaving the field in the past year.
This story was originally published August 23, 2022 at 6:39 PM.
