Hundreds of Health Care Workers Begin a Five-Day Strike in Burbank

At 6 a.m. this morning, around 700 healthcare workers walked out of Burbank’s Providence St. Joseph Medical Center marking the beginning of what they expect to be a five-day strike.

Strikers say they feel overworked and burnt out due to understaffing and high worker turnover.

Eric Sanitate, a respiratory therapist explains that other hospitals in the area offer better pay, better working conditions and better patient safety records.

Sanitate: “Why would anybody want to work here when they can work at a better place? So as a result, we can’t hold on to staff, we can’t retain them in the place just becomes less and less safe. There’s fewer and fewer of us trying to do more and more work for more and more patients. And it’s quite frankly, become a scary situation in there.”

Sanitate says this strike does not surprise him.

Sanitate: “Actually, this is just something that’s just been coming for a long time now...”

He says that he and his colleagues who are represented by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers union still feel the devastating effects of COVID-19.

Sanitate: “A lot of the people you see out here are people who were just absolutely destroyed during the pandemic because of attrition, because of just how difficult it was, because we were just overwhelmed by death, quite frankly. You know, we just could not save COVID patients for the life of us.”

And yet, they stayed on the job and only became more and more exhausted.

Sanitate: “I think this is the culmination of three years basically, of just feeling taken advantage of and disrespected. And I think that’s what you see out here, and I think that’s mainly been the motivation for the strike.”

Providence St. Joseph is Burbank’s only hospital and E.R... It serves a population of over 100,000. As burn out and staffing issues loom over the heads of health care workers, the quality of care has been dropping says Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony.

Anthony: “We were one of the top hospitals in the country and the last few years since the pandemic, that is not the case anymore. I firmly believe that what’s going on with the staffing, what’s going on with the lack of pay incentives for the workers directly affects the care that’s being provided to the patients.”

Hospital officials told ABC7 that they have proposed a 24% increase in wages over a three-year contract but, Christian Ayon, a surgical technician, claims that that would not apply for all workers at the hospital.

Ayon: “If that was true across the board for everyone here, we wouldn’t be out here in the streets. It may be true for certain categories of people, but it’s just not true for everybody. It might rain for 24% that some people getting 18, 19 and all the way down to 14% depending on who you are and what you do.”

For now, the hospital will return to the bargaining table as soon the strike ends in five days.

For Annenberg Media, I’m Zifei Zhang.