Nearly 80 workers at Hospice East Bay, including nurses, social workers, chaplains, and bereavement counselors, are gearing up for a one-day strike today, in Pleasant Hill, starting at 6 a.m. This move comes after approximately 18 months of negotiations for their first contract post-unionizing with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) in 2023. Workers cite severe understaffing and management's refusal to integrate existing patient care protocols into a contract as their core grievances, particularly as the hospice is poised to cede control to Chapters Health System, an out-of-state hospice chain.
According to a statement obtained by KRON4, Jill Tobin, a nurse at Hospice East Bay, expressed the challenges faced by the staff: "I’m supposed to have 10 patients, but I have 15 on my caseload because we’ve lost a lot of qualified nurses." She added, "We’re in people’s homes witnessing their suffering, but we don’t have enough time to provide the care that our patients need." Hospice East Bay management, in anticipation of the strike, assured that a contingency plan is in place with qualified clinicians ready to attend to urgent needs.
The backdrop of the strike includes a consolidating hospice industry with an increasing for-profit entities, which has triggered a spike in union activity among hospice workers. Since 2022, more than 400 hospice workers in Northern California have united under the NUHW umbrella. A precedent for the upcoming strike was set earlier this month when NUHW members at two Providence hospices in Sonoma County took similar action. These strikes aim to obtain contracts before the ownership of their respective hospices transitions to for-profit companies.
Hospice East Bay, established in 1977, serves Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano counties. Despite favorable ratings in federal patient care surveys, the hospice has begun trimming services, such as eliminating its music therapy program last December. This reduction coincides with its impending affiliation with the Chapters Health System, which, as reported by NUHW, continues to introduce efficiencies that can lead to layoffs and greater caseloads at other facilities it has acquired.
Negotiations have become tense, as the union accuses Hospice East Bay of bad-faith bargaining tactics and an inflexibility in securing current staffing ratios and employee benefits within the new contract. Workers are also fighting against potential unilateral increases in employee costs or benefit cuts. Dawn Torre, a bereavement counselor at the hospice, told NUHW, “All we want is to be able to keep our benefits and our patient care protections in place, and all they want is to be able to make them worse.” Workers against Hospice East Bay have also filed Fair Labor Practice charges amidst these contentious contract negotiations.
