Reader comments
Nurses' union efforts die

I am never going to Salt Lake Regional Medical Center

I have worked in a 'unionized' setting and it was frequently contentious. I was forced to help pay for the union leader's big cars and fancy living. It is much nicer to work without union caused coersion. Ronald Reagan decertified the air-traffic controllers union and fired all the employees that refused to work during the ilegal PATCO strike. Air fares dropped and tension was greatly eased. There should be no tension within a hospital.

Unionism is the refuge of the incompatent and lazy. CHeck out teachers and government employees.

I'm not at all a fan of unions. However based on what I have heard from several sources close to the situation it may be one of the only ways to end what has become a very hostile work place and prevent retaliation from hostpital management agianst the nurses. It also seems to me that if the hostpital would like certain nurses to be supervisors then pay them as such and asign them duties permanantly and in line with the raise in pay.

I worked for a hospital in a non-clinical setting that was unionized. While there the nurses went out on strike. I lasted a few months and I was able to view the negotiations from a non-biased perspective. I was an administrative intern during the time and sat in on many of the meetings.

Hands down, it was the worst thing I have witnessed from administrative and clinical perspective. The biggest losers through the entire experience were the patients. The entire experience was contentious and deeply bitter and personal. I feel for the nurses and their work environment and think that the administration should have been more sensitive to their concerns and work loads. However, it was my experience that the union made it very difficult for any decent negotiations to occur. Even after an agreement was finalized the nurses were still bitter and anger.

My take is administration should take any reasonable steps to keep the unions out and take care of the nurses that work on the front lines. The nurses should also meet administration half way and make some changes.

Unions work in some respect but keep them out of healthcare!

I have worked at SLRMC for many years now and have witnessed first hand the harassment these nurses have been through for many years now. I feel they have been targeted for simply trying to make better working conditions for proper patient care. The union was the only answer to what has become a very hostile work environment. FYI Lori, the spoke person for the nurses, was not the only RN fired last week. They have fired multiple nurses with in the last week, each with more then 20 plus years of time and experience at SLRMC, some with more the 35 years dedicated to helping patients and serving this lousy facility that only cares about making money! If I were you I would think twice about going to SLRMC for any reason.....they will be staffed with agency nurses that don't know the hospital well enough to give proper and decent patient care.

My support goes to the nurses and to Lori Gay. She is a fine nurse and that is a great loss to SLRMC and patients. I back the nurses!!!! all the way!!!

Unions haven't been needed in this country for over 50 years. If they were so useful, the cars produced in Detroit would be the best in the world (since virtually everything in Michigan is unionized), but that is not the case.

Unions need to go away. Their entire purpose has become to sustain themselves, not benefit the members.

I work at SLRMC and it is a great place with caring staff. I have been here for almost 8 years and was here when the original talk of unions was started. Sorry, but I think unions are a sham and I am actually glad that we are not going through with it. Here's a tip, you don't like where you work, find another job, there is a nursing shortage. If SLRMC is such a crappy placce, you must ask yourself why these nurses stayed for 20 and 30 years.

I belong to a union and sometimes it benefits me and sometimes it gets in the way. The whole reason unions came about is because of abusive employers who do not care about or listen to their employees. In that case they can provide at least some respect in terms of salary, benefits, workplace environment, etc. If we just had employers who treated their employees like a respectable human resource, there would never be any need for nor talk about creating unions. Everyone loses when people go on strike but I believe it is ultimately the employers who are mostly to blame. They need to view humans as a resource and stop being so concerned with the profit margin and how large the bonuses are for the top executives.

Salt Lake Regional is a fine hosptial and has issues like any other. But, they have been targeted due to high pressure nurses exerting force on the rest of us to push their agenda. This has negatively impacted patient care. I am glad it is over and hope that we can move on without the hostility between groups.

To Anonymous at 8:07 am:
Your statement is grossly unfair and inaccurate. I dare say you have not been employed in government or as a teacher or you would know that incompetence and laziness are not attributes of either of those groups of workers. One must meet high levlels of qualification to gain employment in either of those fields. The work is demanding (Have you ever tried to satisfy all of the public all of the time? It is an impossible task.) and evaluations are regulary completed on all these workers. Those who are found deficient are counselled and placed in programs for mentorship and improvement. It is easy to complain and make unsubstantiated allegations. It is quite difficult to serve the public and deal with complaints when things do not go as each person wants in spite of special consideration and effort. I hope you don't ever have your work held up to public scrutiny where the only the side of the story being told is that of the complainers.

I feel that when it comes to the union I don't think it will fix the problem. The problem is with managment whose main priority is money and their bonuses. The problem is not the nurses, you will see that now that they are gone. The problems are only going to get worse and the patients are going to suffer. The patients are the real losers here, not the nurses that lost their jobs, like someone said above there is a nursing shortage. I would bet they already have jobs. It's too bad that a few people can bring down one facility. What a shame!!!

anonymous#2
with all the laws there are protecting organizers, the nursing shortage, and the high cost of recruiting / hiring experienced workers, I am sure there is much more to this than we are hearing. It sounds like others (SLR Staff's comment) were getting pressured by these nurses. Like "Proud to be an RN" says, there is a nursing shortage, if things were so bad there, why did they stay so long?

Systemic improvement may be driven by caring individuals, but it is management who must lead implementation of that improvement.
It would appear that the nurses who lost their jobs, lost the battle at SLRMC, but management could loose two fold. First they have lost valuable employees with vast amounts of knowledge and experience and second they may loose the war of idealogies if their system does not provide adequate customer service and the place closes and leaves them without jobs. Time will tell...

Having worked at slrmc for 10 plus years now I have also seen first hand how these nurses have been treated. These nurses stayed so long to try and change what has turned into a an out of control issue that has just taken a big turn for the worse. Things have not been bad for 30 years only since the hospital went from Holly Cross and non profit to SLRMC a for profit. This is and has always been about patient care, all these nurses wanted was to keep the level of patient care at its highest the way it was when profit didn't matter. I give SLRMc a year before it has to shut the doors. Good luck to all that still work there!

Having worked at SLRMC for a number of years and watched the hospital change hands from charitable to
for profit, I see the bottom line driving management
to keep costs low at the expense of quality care.
Many nurses left for various reasons. As of the last 5 years, management expected charge nurses to accept
incoming patients whether or not there was adequate
staffing or if there was adequate staffing, some
nurses were not yet capable of high acuity patients.
Wouldn't you rather have an experienced ICU nurse
tell your bosses that a situation is unsafe from a
patients' standpoint --since we hospitals in SLC
are not field hospitals, why would anyone want to
jeopardize a human life? The union organizations
were trying to keep human lives safe--both from
an RN and a patient situation. If management would
deny access to discussion on a safety basis, then
where could nurses go?

We can thank unions for weekends, the 40 hour work week, decent wages. healthcare, retirement, safety rules, etc. I have worked in states that enjoy unions and in right to work states. I had a boss who said I was to honest sent red flags up right a way and later I was sure glad I had a union to help protect me. you do have some worms that are members. But I have also seem a manager state he hate unions. He would try and nail union members and overlook scabs getting away with all kinds of things. Now we have half the work force because mangement was finally forced to deal with the problems they created. The kitchen got too hot for the scabs and left the company. now we just have a boss nobody likes even fellow mangers.

I find it fascinating that these nurses are claiming they are patient advocates.
When I was there these nurses were never willing to mentor the new nurses. "I had to leave because of that". One would think, with all their experience they would teach the new comers, all they did was criticize. They had no intension on building, they wanted to destroy. If that's what a union is all about, I don't want any part of it.

You are never going to SLRMC again, because they don't have a union? What do you think? IHC doesn't have a union. U of U doesn't have a union? They seem to be managing ok.