Closure spurs anger toward striking nurses

Ronnie Polaneczky | Closure spurs anger toward striking nurses
By Ronnie Polaneczky
polaner@phillynews.com

Posted on Tue, Dec. 19, 2003

FOR 27 YEARS, nurse Karen Mealing has felt highly regarded by co-workers at Medical College of Pennsylvania.

But yesterday, one of them called her a "goddamn bitch."

Mealing knows that other soon-to-be-jobless workers at MCP will probably hurl similar epithets when she and other nurses return to work on Monday, following their five-week strike.

And it's killing her.

"I understand that people are angry," she said. "But I feel hurt and betrayed, too. The nurses didn't do this to them. MCP did it to all of us."

It was a glum victory yesterday as MCP's nurses ratified a two-year contract that will end mandatory overtime - their biggest work issue - by June 1.

Only hours before, they'd learned that Tenet Healthcare, MCP's owner, plans to close the hospital for good on March 31.

The news hit Mealing "like a punch in the stomach" when she heard it yesterday morning. What broke her heart, though, was the reaction of a longtime physical therapist whom she saw outside the hospital a short while later.

"I thought he'd say, 'Isn't this terrible?' But he said, 'This is all your fault! You goddamn bitches ruined this for everybody!' "

And then he used the F word, in many ways, to describe Mealing and her fellow strikers.

He is not alone in laying the future loss of 1,000-plus MCP jobs at the feet of the hospital's 268 nurses. Last week, MCP announced it would lay off 165 workers and reduce the hours of 35 others because the strike had reduced the hospital's patient census.

"One woman who'd been there 30 years was let go," intensive-care nurse Karen Lapinski told me. "She yelled at us, 'Are you nurses satisfied now?' "

Lapinski isn't surprised. She and other nurses I spoke to yesterday are convinced this was Tenet's grand plan all along:

Offer the nurses a "crummy contract," forcing a strike. Refuse to negotiate in good faith. Begin the layoffs. Close the hospital. Blame the nurses.

"They can't let anyone think that a big, greedy, for-profit hospital abandoned an entire community," said Lapinski.

Too bad there weren't striking nurses around to blame earlier, when Tenet closed two Philadelphia hospitals and sold a third!

At any rate, this is not how MCP nurses imagined their bitter strike would end, being vilified by people they've worked alongside for years.

When they walked off the job Nov. 11, their most pressing concern was mandation - the practice of forcing nurses to work overtime. It had become standard practice, they argued, for the hospital to use mandation to staff its units, rather than hire the 60 to 75 nurses needed to fill vacant positions.

They argued that mandation put patients at risk, since studies have shown that medical errors increase when a nurse is overworked or tired.

So they rejected a contract requiring mandation, walked the picket line for five weeks and, yesterday, overwhelmingly voted for a new contract that would phase it out.

And for that, they're villains?

Yeah, right, said Lapinski.

"It's flattery to think we could bring down an entire hospital with a five-week strike," she said. "Tenet's problems started long before that."

City Councilman Michael Nutter, a community adviser to the hospital, suspects as much.

Yesterday, he angrily called for Council hearings about the MCP shutdown, saying that Tenet had "turned its back on providing essential health-care services to the citizens of this city."

Mealing hopes the hearings will give everyone an idea of the "bigger picture" that has resulted in her employer's demise.

But what she really wants is for Tenet to change its mind about closing MCP, so that she and others can keep their jobs and once again feel like family, not enemies.

"Yesterday, four of us on the picket line figured out that we had 128 years of employment between us," she marveled. "That's a lot of time. We've stayed not because of Tenet, but because of the people."

She's hoping for their understanding when she returns to work on Monday.

"I know there might be name-calling," she said, "but I'm holding my head high. Nurses are not the problem. MCP is."

Send e-mail to polaner@phillynews.com