A class of healthcare facility support staff, including nursing assistants, security guards, and sanitation workers, have worked alongside doctors and nurses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to keep keep patients and medical buildings safe and clean. It’s a simple line of work that some consider a calling.
Tony Ramirez, 39, a critical care technician at Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, California, finds that helping people in need is more likely than he used to edit documents. engineering for Disneyland. Before the pandemic hit, he would reposition and wash patients and sometimes monitor their vitals. After COVID hit, he took on more duties, providing CPR or emergency medicine, placing leads to monitor heart rate, and conducting post-mortem work. . “We started doing that,” Ramirez said, “because the flow of COVID patients is running very heavy and in a very stressful situation.”
Through it all, his salary of $19.40 an hour was unchanged.
In Southern California, a labor union is trying to help by promoting a $25 minimum wage in private hospitals, psychiatric facilities and dialysis clinics. Service Workers International Union-United Healthcare worker West, which represents about 100,000 healthcare workers in California, said the pay increase will help providers retain workers who could land a similar position. equivalent at Amazon or fast food restaurants amid labor shortages. It would also allow Ramirez to give up one of the three jobs he does just to earn rent.
What began as a union’s 10-city campaign gained recognition for ballot measures in November in just two cities in Los Angeles County, reflecting the costly political jeering between labor and industry. And the $25 minimum wage isn’t the only campaign underway by SEIU-UHW this cycle — the union is also trying for a third time to get dialysis reforms passed.
A ballot-issuing committee called the California Association of Hospitals and Health Systems – with funding from Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, Adventist, Cedars-Sinai, Dignity Health, and hospitals and systems Other health systems – oppose the $25 minimum wage because it increases costs for hospitals and private, but not public, medical facilities. Opponents have captured this disparity by calling it an “unequal pay measure.” An analysis conducted by the California Hospital Association estimated that the change would increase costs for private facilities by $392 million a year, a 6.9% increase across 10 cities.
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“No one in the hospital and no one in the healthcare industry opposes living wages,” said George Greene, president and chief executive officer of the Southern California Hospital Association. “But we believe this has to be a measured and thought-out statewide conversation.”
Earlier this year, city councils in Los Angeles, Downey, Monterey Park and Long Beach passed similar ordinances on the $25 minimum wage for healthcare workers, but they were thwarted by hospitals and challenging health facilities, putting the issue up for a vote in 2024. Meanwhile, the union dropped the effort in Anaheim and failed to gather enough signatures in Culver City, Lynwood, or Baldwin Park to get a minimum wage on the fall ballot. As a result, only voters in Inglewood and Duarte will vote – on Measure HC and Measure J respectively – this November.
Spending on the fight over minimum wage proposals in Southern California has reached nearly $22 million. According to state campaign finance filings, SEIU-UHW spent nearly $11 million in all 10 cities. Hospitals and medical facilities also spent nearly $11 million beating minimum wage proposals.
Unions have long agitated for a wide-ranging minimum wage increase. In 2016, labor played a key role in the successful lobbying of the then-Government. Jerry Brown made California the first state to set a $15 minimum wage, a graduation measure that goes into effect this year for all employers with 26 or more workers. About 40 local governments set their minimum wages above the state minimum. The federal minimum wage remains $7.25.
SEIU-UHW has envisaged a statewide scope, as well as an existing partial strategy to target cities in and around Los Angeles. The union’s political director, Suzanne Jimenez, said: “Initially we looked at each city. “And then a conversation around implementing it statewide emerged but ultimately didn’t move forward.”
That’s in part because the agreement to establish a statewide minimum wage at public and private hospitals was broken at the end of the last legislative session, and such victories are harder to come by than in the past. , Bill Sokol, a labor attorney who has worked with SEIU-UHW.
“It’s not about what we wish we could do, it’s about where we can win,” Sokol said. “The answer is in one city at a time.”
Union leaders said they targeted cities where an internal poll showed popular support. Jimenez said the proposal was supported by a majority in Inglewood but Duarte was too small to sample. The measures need a majority of votes in each city to pass, and if that happens, they will take effect 30 days after the results are certified.
Jimenez said if the approach proves successful in Los Angeles County, the union will consider bringing the proposal to other parts of the state, including the Inland Empire and Sacramento. That could ultimately fuel change statewide.
If voters in Inglewood and Duarte pass the $25 minimum wage, the impact will be limited. Workers at state and county-run health facilities are not covered by city ordinances, so local measures will not apply. That means it does not include workers who do similar jobs in hospitals, clinics and public health facilities.
In Inglewood, this measure will only apply to Centinela Hospital Medical Center and certain for-profit dialysis clinics. In Duarte, it will be applied to the City of Hope, a private cancer hospital.
Many labor economists agree that something needs to be improved for this workforce: They need higher wages and better working conditions. That comes at a heavy cost for the health system, says Joanne Spetz, director of the Philip R. Lee Health Policy Research Institute at the University of California-San Francisco.
“Who pays for that in the end? Consumers do,” said Specz. “You might cut the margins of a publicly traded company a bit, but the reality is those companies are pretty good at figuring out how to sustain their revenue and profits.”
However, the union said the $25 minimum wage would help the lowest-paid members of the health care workforce, who disproportionately are women, immigrants and people of color.
Read more:
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Andrew Kelly, assistant professor of public health at Cal State East Bay, said a pay increase at one facility can have a big impact because surrounding facilities will then need a raise to compete.
Currently, the living wage in LA County for a childless adult is $21.89 an hour, or a little more than $45,500 a year, according to a tool from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Careers like “healthcare assistant” typically pay about $33,000 annually in the county, according to the same tool.
By Election Day, most Southern California health care workers will have to watch from the sidelines.
In Monterey Park, where Ramirez works, the city council approved a $25 minimum wage, but protesters invalidated the vote, arguing that the council lacked a quorum at the time. . The council ended putting the question on the ballot in 2024, two years from now. Ramirez says new hires at his medical center start at $15.30 an hour doing the dirtiest jobs in the hospital, and that five workers have left his department this year.
“It’s disappointing, I’m not going to lie,” Ramirez said. “These elected officials know what’s going on.”
Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service. This is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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