Read Online The Side of the Angels by Christina Bartolomeo, Kyoko Watanabe - Free Book Online

experts with a track record in private-sector organizing. What he could afford, thanks to Goreman’s budget pinching, was Ron and me, flying by the seat of our pants.
    *      *      *
    Without even looking, Weingould put his hand on the one manila folder he needed in the stack of thirty on his desk. As he did so, pink message slips and penciled reminders from his secretary fluttered to the floor and were rolled to shreds under the wheels of his desk chair.
    Ron pulled out his engraved Mont Blanc pen and the leather-bound notebook with his initials stamped on the cover. He brought them to every client meeting. Ron loved obvious executive accessories. Like any actor, he needed a few props. I dug out a steno pad and a Bic.
    â€œWe have a situation here,” said Weingould in his verbal shorthand. “Our local at St. Francis is a fair-size local, maybe one hundred, one-fifty nurses. Catholic hospital in a small blue-collar mill town.
Used
to be a mill town, anyway, like all those towns up there, depressing as hell. Hospital’s been operating since 1910, was run at one time by the Little Sisters of St. Francis with lay nurses added over the years. We won our first election in 1979, actually bargained pretty decent contracts since then. Clare Murray is the local president there. Done well for the past eight years. Well respected, not just at the hospital but at the state level.”
    Ron inscribed, “Murray—well respected” in his notebook. His handwriting is large and sprawling. You can tell he never went to parochial school.
    â€œMurray grew up right there in Winsack. Always had a good, productive relationship with the administration. Two years ago the hospital was acquired by a big for-profit chain, Coventry Inc., and things are going to hell in a handbasket. Take a look at this.”
    â€œThis” was a petition from the St. Francis nurses on the medical-surgical floor. A med-surg floor, I could gather from the wording, was a regular hospital floor, rather than an intensive care or cardiac unit. The nurses were asking the hospital to remedy certain dangerous conditions in their unit. The problems listed made me hope I never needed my tonsils out.
    I read the petition text over Ron’s shoulder.
    â€œWe are alarmed by a nurse-patient ratio that has gone from one to three, to one to eight in the past year,”
the nurses had written.
    â€œOne nurse to eight patients?” I asked Weingould.
    â€œThat’s the first step these for-profits take. Cutting labor costs, and nurses are expensive labor.”
    We read on.
“Incident reports include: a sixty-year-old male who waited more than an hour for a herapin drip due to equipment shortages … some patients going ten hours without vital signs taken because the two night nurses were occupied with higher acuity cases … inadequate nurse training on infusion pumps which could result in fatal dosage errors, including one incident in which an exhausted nurse in the fourteenth hour of her shift keyed in 82 milligrams of morphine instead of 8.2 milligrams before realizing her mistake … a patient assigned a bed in the supply room because all other rooms were overcrowded already.”
    What surprised me most was that the petition, according to Weingould, had been signed by every single nurse in the med-surg unit. You almost never saw that. Hospitals did not look kindly on nurses who were “troublemakers.” Conditions must be really lousy at St. Francis.
    â€œNegotiations were a disaster from day one,” Weingould said, loosening his tie. Ron loosened his too. I had nothing to loosen, so I crossed my legs.
    â€œThe nurses were focusing on staffing and safety issues,” Weingould went on. “No big-money demands. We knew we were in trouble when the hospital waited two months past the official start of bargaining to submit its bargaining proposals. When they did, we