200 Nurses Seek to Leave County Employees Union

More than 200 county nurses, irked by their union’s efforts in a recent labor dispute, are moving to join a statewide nurses union.

They say the change would give them a greater voice in patient care at Ventura County Medical Center.

If the nurses leave the 4,000-member Public Employees Assn. of Ventura County, it will be the largest defection from that broad-based union in at least a decade, county officials said.

The nurses’ frustration with PEAVC, which represents most county employees, has festered for two decades. It peaked last month when negotiations over a cut in pay for nurses working 12-hour shifts reached a stalemate and was resolved only after mediation.

“The nurses have always been unhappy with PEAVC,” spokeswoman Kathleen Worden said Tuesday in an interview. “We need a contract that addresses only health-care needs, not what the gardeners are doing or the tree-trimmers.”

Worden said 240 of the 318 nurses and lab technicians in the county’s Health Care Agency--primarily nurses at the county hospital--have petitioned the county to let them leave PEAVC. Nearly as many have said they want to join the 26,000-member California Nurses Assn., she said.

An election, under the auspices of the county Civil Service Commission, could be held as early as December, so the outcome would be known before the PEAVC contract expires Dec. 22, county officials said.

Under the existing contract, nurses cannot insist on being heard on issues such as staff shortages and poor patient care, Worden said. “We have felt helpless.”

Barry L. Hammitt, executive director of PEAVC since 1974, said the nurses can affiliate with any union they please. But they have tried to leave his union twice before--in 1972 and 1978--and failed both times, he said.

“It’s the grass is always greener syndrome that goes on from time to time,” Hammitt said.

Other professional groups--such as county engineers--have left the union only to come back because of bad contracts or poor representation by the large unions they joined, Hammitt said.

As with the nurses, county probation officers said they wanted a contract that would address their unique professional needs when they left PEAVC three years ago, Hammitt said.

“But if you lay their contract next to my contract, the words are the same and the numbers are the same,” he said. “They have the same procedures to resolve a dispute.”

But Worden said the union’s handling of the recent wage dispute is another reason to change unions. The dispute was unnecessarily contentious, she said, because of Hammitt’s combative personality.

“This situation was very bizarre,” she said. “Mr. Hammitt would make inappropriate remarks about the Board (of Supervisors) . . . name-calling like a juvenile. I had nurses say they would not stay on the picket line because of statements he made to the newspaper.”

Nor could the nurses get Hammitt “to sit down with us and (hospital administrators) and just talk. His position is ‘it’s us against them.’ And for nurses there’s a lot more gray area than that, a lot more need for cooperation because we’re all talking about patient care.”

Hammitt said the nurses may not like his approach, but he is effective.

“Maybe our bedside manner isn’t the best,” he said, “But the bottom line is whether . . . we deliver for the nurses.”

Hammitt said he insisted on meeting with the county’s designated negotiators rather than hospital administrator Pierre Durand, as some nurses wanted, because Durand had no power to reach an agreement.

“Pierre was playing on the fears of the nurses, by threatening to take something away from them,” Hammitt said. But the county finally dropped its proposed 3% cut in pay for 115 nurses who worked 12-hour shifts, he said.

“We negotiated an agreement that everybody could live with, and the county blinked,” Hammitt said.