University of Vermont Medical Center is making plans to fly hundreds of out-of-town nurses to Burlington to fill in if its nurses strike for two days next week. A staffing agency is recruiting nurses online and reserving local hotel rooms.
Hotel Vermont general manager Joseph Carton said Tuesday morning that an agency tried to reserve 600 rooms in Burlington. Hotel Vermont, which has 125 rooms, could not accommodate the entire request. But the agency ultimately reserved 32 rooms between Hotel Vermont and the Courtyard Burlington Harbor next door, which is owned by the same company, Carton said.
Hospital spokesperson Michael Carrese said the hospital has gone to Autumn Consulting Services to deal with the potential strike on July 12 and 13. “Labor dispute staffing now” is the tagline on the company’s homepage. One of the services offered is nursing strike preparation.
“Organizational labor disputes are complex,” the site says. “Continuing to provide optimal care is critical to both your stakeholders and the community. ACS works with your team to establish a contingency plan that secures your reputation and supports the lives of your patients.”
A screenshot from a Facebook group showed that the staffing agency guarantees 36 hours of work at $62 per hour. The post says the hospital is also covering the cost of flights and lodging for the temporary nurses.
Laurie Aunchman, the president of the Vermont Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals, said it didn’t surprise her that the hospital was preparing for a strike, just as the 1,800-member union is. “We’re still going to have patients in the hospital that need to be taken care of, and the hospital has to do what it needs to do in taking care of the patients that remain,” she said.
Still, Aunchman said, the money that the hospital is spending on temporary nurses would be better used paying the nurses that already work there.
“A strike would be expensive and we are doing everything we can to avoid it,” Carrese said. “Which is why we have nearly doubled our wage offer, agreed to a wage increase for outpatient nurses of up to 25 percent to begin in the next two months instead of spread over three years, agreed to changes in staffing requested by the union, and made other significant moves responsive to the union’s requests.”
He didn’t know how many nurses might be brought in.
“[W]e won’t know how many we’ll need from the agency until we find out how many of our nurses are planning to come to work during the strike, should there be one,” he said. “We expect to have that information early next week.”
The union gave 10 days notice of a strike on Monday, but it could be averted if the union and administrators reach a deal in contract negotiations.
Both sides voiced willingness Tuesday to work together to avoid a strike.
“We look forward to continuing our dialogue with the union to reach a fair agreement that supports our nurses in their incredibly important work,” Carrese said.
Aunchman said Tuesday that no negotiating sessions were scheduled. “If the hospital wants to be at the table tomorrow, we will be there,” she said.
Any strike could have ugly aspects. As news of the Hotel Vermont reservations spread, users took to the hotel’s Facebook page to criticize management for reserving rooms for nonunion nurses who would backfill for strikers.
“It seems like you’re doing a really disservice to the community by hosting scabs at your hotel,” wrote a user going by Micum MacIntyre, whose profile says he’s from Montpelier. “You should be supporting the nurses who are just trying to make sure we can get quality medical care while taking care of those who provide it. I hope you’ll consider not taking this dirty money.”
Hotel manager Carton said he’s “empathetic” to the cause of the nurses. But he said he doesn’t want Hotel Vermont to join the ranks of businesses in the news for denying service, noting the recent controversy surrounding the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia, which booted President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“It’s not, ‘You can stay here, and you can’t,'” he said. “We’re just open for business.”
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Here come the scabs. If Hotel Vermont accommodates these people then the 1%er Hotel Vermont should be boycotted and workers should have a sit-down strike.
GOP/Trump’s Amerika= Gut the middle class and kill the poor, making the world kneel to the Capitalist Cannibals.
Why criticize a hotel for offering its services? The Hotel Vermont is in the business of selling rooms to people who need to sleep there. To criticize them for doing just that, selling their services to people who are needing a place to sleep, whether they are or aren’t temporary nurses is absurd. Are the nurses criminals? They are just people looking to help people live
Should you prefer the Hotel discriminate based on a customer’s job status?
What if the new nurses staying at the Hotel Vermont are more qualified than the current nurses on staff?
What if they save lives while they’re here? What if yours is one of them?
Be smart and think before you get on your soapbox. The Hotel Vermont is a business which is trying to stay in business, and it’s giving life savers a mattress. Get a hold of yourself.
NorthOldEnder: I’d like to see those ‘scabs’ hired permanently. These nurses clamor for more money under the ‘auspices’ of fair treatment like the CEOS. What crap. Do you really think that any raise in pay will cut into the CEO’s profit? No. They will just raise the cost for you! This isn’t about ‘Patients Before Profits’. What a scam. Believing that is as dumb as believing that teachers strike because they love their students.
Anyone who trusts their healthcare to a bunch of scab nurses who can’t get regular jobs is out of their mind. Don’t trust your mother’s or child’s healthcare to these mercenaries who truly are in it only for the money. If you’ve ever experienced a strike you already know to cancel your healthcare appointments for July 12th and 13th NOW! UVMed can protest all they want, but the simple fact of the matter is that care in the hospital will be both sub-standard and unsafe on those days. Don’t be a fool; cancel your July appointments today!
Any place that accommodates these scabs had best be prepared for protests and pickets on their doorsteps. I wonder how the rest of their guests will feel about that. Image how the Yelp, Travelocity, and other reviews will look afterwards. Those businesses have to stay here after the scabs go, and the members of the community will remember which side these hotels and restaurants are on. Count on it.
mercenaries? Scabs? They’re humans who save lives. Just because they aren’t part of a Union doesn’t mean they’re second class citizens, they just haven’t paid dues to an organization.
What if the Hotel Vermont wouldn’t give you accommodation based on race, religion, sex, annual income, height or weight? You’re asking them to discriminate based on job status..
I’m sure if you had a car accident and a temporary nurse gave you lifesaving care, would it really matter whether S/he paid dues to a Union?
I’d be grateful that they were available to replace people who are leaving their patients to fend for themselves.
Seems like another good argument for state-run healthcare. Nurses could be paid properly, and hospital CEOs would be too (with cuts in their pay).
The hospital can afford to fly in out of towners but they can’t afford to pay nurses what they deserve? The hospital makes no sense at all. If they can afford to pay for rooms then they can afford to give higher pay!
Did you boycotting all the hotels that rent out the rooms for the crazy protesters who come to Vermont.?? Bet not. Hotels are in the business to accommodate people who need a place to stay overnight or a few wks. They aren’t supposed to discriminate, who you are, race or what your job is. . I care about the hospital having nurses there to take care of the patients, no matter where they come from. Unions are nothing but hate group who are money hungry.. They don’t care if you work or not. just pay your dues. You people need to leave unions. . Yes nurses need to get paid, they do a lot.. but if they strike someone has to fill in.. They aren’t scabs, they are nurses who are doing this temporary .! My husband was in the union and died on the job. What did the union do ? Gave me a white bible .. no sorry, no if you need anything or if we can help call. Never heard anything, Hell they didn’t ( union officers) even come to his funeral.!!!
PLEASE DON’T BLAME THE NURSES FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING!!!!!!!
The UVMMC nurses are asking for 24% wage increase over 3 years. The administrators literally only picked out hospitals that had lower wages than UVMMC nurses to compare them to when deciding what they think UVMMC nurses are worth.
CVPH nurses in Plattsburgh are making 16.2% more than Burlington nurses are and their cost of living is 23.6% cheaper than here. Keep in mind that CVPH is a community hospital and UVMMC takes their sickest patients.
Nurses have asked UVMMC administrators specifically if they CAN’T afford to pay us those wages or if they Won’t. They have never said once they can’t, they only say they won’t. That speaks volumes about how they view their nurses and the quality of care we provide. They know they are a monopoly with deep pockets and assume we can’t or won’t go somewhere else to work. Remember, our hospital is SUPPOSED to be non-profit!
According to a Vermont Digger article last year: “Dr. John Brumsted, the CEO of the University of Vermont Health Network and its flagship hospital, took in nearly $2.19 million in compensation that year. Brumsteds total compensation includes $979,064 in base pay and $492,000 in bonuses…Eleven other executives at the UVM Health Network and the UVM Medical Center made more than $500,000 in salary and benefits in 2015. Many of them shared in the same bonuses that Brumsted received that year for meeting financial, quality and operational goals.”
To contact the hospital administration and express your concern for the lack of motivation the hospital has in coming to a contract resolution with our nurses please call 802-847-1124 or email lisa.powlison@uvmhealth.org.
They cannot afford to pay the nurses yet the hospital requests to put them up at the most expensive hotel in downtown Burlington, that goes for over $300 a night. Now that is a slap in the nurses face.
Why are they not utilizing the dorms at UVM for these nurses? The Courtyard goes for over $250 a night, the Hilton over $250 a night.
All these dorms are vacant, yet the Hospital spends more money by putting them up at these hotels.
Ms. Whalen and company how do you sleep at night? You spend money on useless things, main one renaming it for the narcissistic ego of one of the Dr’s. Is one of the areas that comes to mind.
The nurses are the heartbeat of the hospital. Anyone who has ever spent any time there knows this.
So with the increasingly hazardous work conditions for nurses trying to burn the candle at both ends while helping save and care for patients, who would support scabs coming with in a huge paycheck, trained under two days to simply try and fill the shoes of the present nurses? Makes no sense and guaranteed to increase the chance of injury , death, and malpractice suits. The for profit scab for hire company laughs all the way to the bank, no one shows up at their door. And as it typically in capitalism, everyone else fights for the same slice of pie. National healthcare would take care of this.