Ascension St. Joe's To Implement Parts Of Contract Rejected By Nurses

JOLIET, IL — With Ascension St. Joseph Hospital officials and union nurses still widely divided on a new contract for nurses, the hospital announced on Tuesday that it will begin to implement elements of its best and final contract offer — the same one nurses overwhelmingly rejected in a vote last month, that the nurses' union claims is illegal.

Nearly 80 percent of nurses voted the contract proposal down before Christmas and since then, both sides have maintained that the other has offered to budge on moving toward a new deal. The two sides met on Friday but came away with no meaningful dialogue after a union representative told Patch on Monday that the hospital came “wholly unprepared” for the session. On Tuesday, the hospital said that the union arrived at the bargaining session with no new proposals or adjustments to their most recent proposal for officials to consider.

The hospital previously declared an impasse between the two sides — a term that the union said was inaccurate in describing the nature of the negotiations. However, after Friday’s session failed to bring hospital officials and nurses closer, the hospital declared that it would begin to implement its contract offer on January 21.

“We are proceeding on this path because it is the right thing to do for our nurses, patients, and community,” Ascension St. Joseph Hospital said in a statement on Tuesday. “We can no longer delay paying our nurses a competitive wage and must be able to successfully recruit and hire nurses to support our care teams.

“Joliet residents deserve ready access to the quality care they expect from Saint Joseph - Joliet, and we have the responsibility to ensure we have the ability to provide that care to all who need it, now, and for generations to come.”

The hospital said that it has already begun updating compensation models and systems to ensure that nurses are paid at a competitive rate. In its best and final contract offer, the hospital said that some nurses would receive double-digit raises and would see pay increases beginning in the first year of the deal and more raises in subsequent years.

However, because of the size of the workforce of nurses and the shift to placing our nurses on the new wage scale based on years of licensure, this work will take hospital officials three pay periods from the January 21 implementation date to complete. Raises for nurses will then go into effect on March 3, the hospital said.

The hospital also said that it will begin implementing improved policies around new hire orientation, its critical staffing incentive program, and referral bonuses — as well as instituting increases in float differential and call pay as of the January 21 implementation date.

However, the union said on Tuesday that the hospital’s implementation of its best and final offer is illegal, according to union lawyers.

“We believe this is illegal because there is no evidence of the ‘impasse’ Ascension is claiming,” Illinois Nurses Association legal counsel Matt Barnes said in a statement issued on Tuesday. “But beyond that, we have only found a handful of examples of a company attempting to push through a contract that has been soundly rejected by a majority of its workforce.”

The union said that in recent months, 30 nurses have left their jobs at St. Joseph’s for better opportunities or have retired as nurses continue to work without a contract. Nurses have worked without a deal in place since May and have twice gone on strike as they continue to fight for better pay and better work conditions. Seventy-nine percent of nurses rejected the hospital's best and final contract offer last month, as union officials accused hospital officials of not knowing how to operate a medical facility.

The main issues on the table are wages and the ever-expanding demands on staff nurses. Since the contract expired over the summer, nurses have gone out on two Unfair Labor Practice strikes, sounding the alarm about what they claim is dangerous understaffing and the company’s failure to bargain in good faith.

The union said that the hospital began implementing parts of its best and final contract offer before Christmas, when officials said that nurses were forced to work outside their normal service areas due to staffing shortages. Last week, the hospital announced that its Chief Nursing Officer had resigned after less than six months on the job, in a move that the union said shows how poorly the hospital is being operated.

With more nurses continuing to leave their jobs, the union says that staffing levels and the hospital forcing nurses to be pulled into other areas of the hospital to work is unsafe.

“The hospital is employing policies that directly lead to patients dying,” St. Joseph’s nurse Jeanine Johnson said in a statement issued on Tuesday. “The nurses at St. Joe’s are doing everything in their power to protect the people of Joliet, but it has become clear that Ascension cares more about busting our union than it does about saving lives.”