Nurses United of the National Capital Region will soon announce the date of a 24-hour strike at Washington Hospital Center to protest the firing of 18 nurses after February’s “Snowmageddon.”
The date for the work stoppage will be announced this week to comply with a federal requirement for 10 days notice to hospital management. Should the strike go forward, Washington Hospital Center plans to hire replacement nurses and continue on its regular schedule, according to a hospital statement.
The union is demanding that the terminated nurses be reinstated with back pay and that management ensure the situation does not happen again. Nearly 80 percent of the 675 nurses who voted late last week approved the strike. All of the approximately 1,600 nurses working at the hospital belong to the union.
Union spokesman Stephen Frum, a nurse at the hospital, said the firings violated the hospital’s snow emergency policy. Some nurses missed work during the first storm but slept at the hospital in order to work during the second storm and were still disciplined, he said.
“We are protesting the mistreatment by our employer of all 1,600 nurses, which ranged from threats given to nurses to actual termination,” he said. “They’ve never fired anybody for a single instance of absence in 50 years [before this].”
But hospital management says the absences had nothing to do with the snow.
“These nurses have the responsibility to take care of their patients. They refused to come to work. It wasn’t that they weren’t able to come to work. For some of the nurses we provided transportation, and they refused it. Some were called in before the snowflakes fell,” hospital spokeswoman So Young Pak said.
The hospital rehired nine of the 18 nurses after an investigation, Pak said.
The hospital’s management has changed as well. Since February, the hospital replaced its president, senior vice president of human resources and chief nursing officer.
