At least 800 nurses and several hundred other health care workers in Chicago went on strike Monday, demanding safer working conditions and fair wages.
“Nurses across the country are at a tipping point,” said Doris Carroll, who has been a nurse at the University of Illinois Health for more than three decades and is president of the board of directors of the Illinois Nurses Association. She said chronic staffing shortages were a problem even before COVID-19; now things are worse. “When the pandemic hit, it was horrific,” she said.
She explained that having a manageable nurse-to-patient ratio is safer for patients, and for nurses, who are overwhelmed by the number of patients they have to treat with a thin staff. Then there are the temporary health care workers the hospital hired to treat patients during the seven-day strike, some of whom come from COVID-19 hotspots.
In addition to the money hospitals are spending on temporary workers, Carroll expressed concern about temporary workers from hard-hit states who could cause hospital outbreaks.
Nurses at the University of Illinois Hospital (UIH) demonstrate on the first day of their strike in Chicago on September 12, 2020.
Max Hermann/Nour Photo via ZUMA Press
Nurses are not discouraged by working conditions at the University of Illinois Hospital, a public hospital. “The strike was not a decision we took lightly,” says LaVita Steward, an administrative assistant in the ophthalmology department who is known as “Mrs. V.”
Steward, who works in a local bargaining unit for the Service Employees International Union, which represents health care workers, described the working conditions she and her colleagues face on the front lines. In addition to staff shortages, she said, the union’s lowest-paid workers, who clean hospital rooms and classrooms, aren’t being paid enough to live on. Some are working second jobs in the evenings after their full-time shifts at the hospital to make ends meet.
“You shouldn’t have to work a full-time day job, then work another job in the evening to feed your family and pay for child care,” she added. “We are the families who live in the community. We are affected by the pandemic. We are hurting. And on top of that, we are working long hours and getting paid less than our standard.”
Michael Zinn, CEO of the University of Illinois Hospital and Clinics, rejected nurses’ call to set limits on the number of patients they treat in a statement. Zinn said that one-size-fits-all staffing ratios are “too stringent.” If the hospital sets a limit on the number of patients nurses can treat, wait times in the emergency department will increase and operating costs will rise, Zinn said.
Zinn also defended the 500 nurses and agency staff hired by the University of Illinois to temporarily replace striking workers. The hospital is requiring all nurses and temporary staff from COVID-19 hotspots to be tested before they start work. “We are going beyond the Chicago Department of Public Health’s requirements for essential health care worker travel,” he said. “Of the 523 agency staff hired by UI Health, 32 are from a designated hotspot state, and none have tested positive.”
But Steward saw the situation differently. “2020 is the year of awakening,” she said. “We want the University of Illinois at Chicago to be part of that movement.”
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