SEIUHW
Members of SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin joined tens of thousands at the Capitol in 2012 to protest the first anniversary of Act 10 being signed into law. The law eventually ended the representation of nurses at UW Health. But nurses there are now organizing a new union.
Eight years after Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 ended union representation for nurses in the UW Health system, nurses are asking the hospital to “voluntarily recognize” their newly formed union and bargain with them.
The nurses held a news conference Dec. 19 at the First Unitarian Society to announce that they have organized with SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin, the same union that represented them before Act 10. They say the union drive developed in response to chronic understaffing at the hospital. In a statement, the nurses attributed the staffing situation to a “shift away from a core value of fully supporting top quality nursing care, and towards a value of prioritizing maximum corporate profits.”
The news conference was the first public demonstration from a campaign almost a year in the making. If the hospital agrees to recognize the union, the bargaining unit would cover approximately 2,200 nurses.
Although the nurses are not guaranteed the right to collectively bargain, they want UW Health to recognize them as a union and negotiate over workplace issues. Whether UW Health will recognize the union is unclear.
Members of the union campaign say that recent changes in nurse-to-patient ratios at the UW Health system catalyzed the union drive. “Typically we only take three to four patients [per nurse],” says Shari Signer, who has been a UW nurse for 13 years. “Now at many of the general care units we have five patients and going up.”
Chuck Linsenmeyer, a registered nurse who works in the cardiac catheterization lab and has been employed at the hospital for more than 20 years, agrees that work loads have clearly increased.
“There’s been some dramatic changes in the way that our hospital’s been run in the past few years,” Linsenmeyer says. “Of course, the main way that that’s manifested is in lower staffing and in a change in the nurse-patient ratios…. It got to the point where there [was] a critical mass of nurses who felt like they were being faced with the choice of either quitting their job or organizing to try to change things.”
UW Health spokesperson Tom Russell responded to nurses’ concerns about staffing levels in an email to Isthmus, saying that the UW facilities are “at or better than the national standard on nursing hours per patient day. We continually benchmark our organization against other academic health centers throughout the country to ensure we are competitive in our employment practices, and monitor health and safety outcomes.
“Because of the incredible contributions of our nurses, staff and faculty, UW Health has repeatedly been recognized as a Magnet organization by the American Nurses Credentialing Center,” Russell adds.
Skewed nurse-to-patient ratios at the UW hospitals and clinics reflect a broader trend in health care around the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 13 percent of nurses in the United States are projected to retire in the next 10 years, leaving over 1 million positions vacant. The Wisconsin Nurses Association predicts an even steeper rate of attrition within the profession, anticipating that over 40 percent of registered nurses in the state will retire in the next decade.
But the nationwide nursing shortage may not entirely explain understaffing at Wisconsin’s decorated hospital. In 2017, UW Health, in consultation with Chicago-based consulting firm Prism Healthcare Partners, launched a program designed to drive down labor costs at the UW Health system. Under the revised labor system, vacated positions were subject to careful review, rather than being automatically filled, and the creation of new positions was rarely permitted, according to a webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review, a trade publication.
An August 2018 article in Becker’s Hospital Review describes how the program — which “saved millions” for UW Health — “allowed for natural staff attrition to drive labor reductions.”
In the webinar, representatives of UW Health and Prism Healthcare Partners say that in order to implement the new hiring regime, hospital administrators were required to quantify the “productivity” of hospital staff using an app to track worker hours and other labor-related data. In the webinar, one UW representative describes a hypothetical sandwich shop to illustrate the relationship between workers and their labor.
“Let’s say...for every lunch shift that I worked, I needed to make at least five sandwiches,” says the UW Health panelist. “In productivity terms that would mean that I needed to make one sandwich every 30 minutes, or .5 worked hours per unit of service.”
Of course, patients aren’t sandwiches. But by applying the logic of a fast food chain to workers at the hospitals and clinics, the organization was able to reduce the size of its workforce.
Nurses say this new staffing structure has contributed to a stressful — and even dangerous — work environment. “The morale with the nurses definitely decreased,” says Signer. “You’re just running from room to room trying to care for people to the best of your ability.”
“We don’t feel like we have the ability to give our patients the care they deserve because we don’t have the people there to do it,” says Kate Walton, a nurse who works in the emergency department. “There have been things that we’ve had to get through by the skin of our teeth that we shouldn’t have needed to.”
UW Health is currently making a push to fill vacancies. The university's nursing program has implemented an accelerated program for students seeking their license — and has listed over 120 vacant positions on their website.
In a statement to Isthmus regarding nursing shortages, a spokesperson for UW Health wrote that “While the Madison area has not been hit as hard as some other areas of the country, it is still a critical concern for UW Health...We’ve expanded our nationally recognized nurse residency program. Our Pathways program not only serves as a recruitment vehicle, it also focuses on many of the most underserved areas in our community.” The university's nursing program has also implemented an accelerated program for students seeking their license — and has listed over 120 open positions on their website.
