UW Health nurses on Friday gave administrators an official advanced notice of their plan to strike Sept. 13-16, saying they seek quality patient care, safe staffing and recognition of their union.
The 10-day notice, required by labor law, came after nurses said last week they voted to strike unless UW Health administrators agreed to recognize and bargain with their union, a request they have been making since December 2019.
“I’m striking to take a stand for quality patient care for my community and the well-being of frontline nurses,” Amanda Klinge, a nurse in the orthopedic trauma unit at UW Health, said in a statement. “When my nurse colleagues and I see potentially preventable patient care problems occur day after day because of extreme understaffing, it is damaging to our psyche and our very soul.”
Nurses again said Friday they are “leaving the door open for dialogue, and the responsibility is on the UW Health Board and administration to come to the table and recognize their union in order to avoid the imminent strike,” according to a statement.
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SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin, the union trying to organize the unit, said last week that UW nurses “have been struggling with a dangerous crisis of understaffing, turnover, cuts, exhaustion and burnout, which has been aggravated by the pandemic and puts patient care at risk.”
UW Health last week said the strike would be “unpleasant for patients and for our staff but we will get through it.”
On Friday, UW Health said it is “ensuring patient care is impacted as minimally as possible.” It said the official notice “is unfortunate given that a strike will do nothing to alter the legal uncertainties surrounding the health system’s ability to collectively bargain.”
Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature legislation, Act 10, banned collective bargaining for public workers except for cost-of-living pay increases. At the time, UW Hospital administrators said the law abolished unions at the hospital even though they didn’t seek that action. In 2014, when a contract for about 2,000 nurses and therapists represented by SEIU expired, they lost the union.
In December 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began, nurses announced they were restarting the union and asked the UW Hospital Board to voluntarily recognize it. The board and hospital leaders have repeatedly said the law doesn’t allow them to recognize and bargain with the union.
Unlike other public employees affected by Act 10, UW Hospital workers are not state or municipal employees. When the hospital became a public authority separate from the university in 1996, it acquired its own special status. How Act 10 and other laws apply to that status has been the subject of various legal memos.
After two memos last year from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Council appeared to reach different conclusions, Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul in June said the hospital can contract with its employees and set their terms of employment through a voluntary collective bargaining process. Kaul’s nonbinding opinion came at the request of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
UW Health last week said: “The Attorney General has said he believes we can, but by his own admission states that his opinion is not law and that only the courts or the legislature can provide a conclusive answer.”
In January, SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin said it gave UW Health CEO Dr. Alan Kaplan more than 1,500 cards signed by nurses supporting a union. SEIU says 2,600 nurses at UW Hospital would be in the bargaining unit.