Nurses Allege Employment Discrimination at SF Hospitals

Lengthy contract talks between the California Nurses Association and Sutter Health's California Pacific Medical Center, and St. Luke's Hospital in San Francisco turned toxic last week when the union filed a grievance with the city claiming that Sutter had imposed a hiring ban on Filipino nurses.

At a press conference, CNA and Filipino community and church groups have asked the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to investigate their allegations of "systematic" employment discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin.

"St. Luke's and CPMC RNs, many of them Filipino, have been outspoken in defense of their patients, and in opposition to Sutter and CPMC's plans to reduce services to the largely lower income, minority community depending on St. Luke's from SOMA to the Excelsior," said CNA Co-president Zenei Cortez, RN.

 "Rather than respond to the concerns of the community, CPMC and Sutter have chosen instead to retaliate by carrying out a punitive, illegal, and immoral campaign of discrimination," said Cortez. "There can be no excuse for racial or ethnic discrimination. A hospital should be a center of therapeutic healing for patients, not a model of bigotry."

CPMC CEO Warren Browner, MD, called the accusations "false and designed to cover up the union's own failure to win a contract despite three years of negotiations."

"We pride ourselves on our diverse hiring policies and our longstanding commitment to promoting equal opportunity employment," Browner said. "The allegations of discrimination made by the California Nurses Association are dishonest and without merit."

CNA said the hospitals' hiring data supports the discrimination complaint, and details a major demographic shift among the nurses being hired at St Luke's that began in early 2008. Before February 2008, 65% of St Luke's RNs were Filipino. After February 2008, only 10% of RNs hired were Filipino.

Browner said the hospital's data tells a different story. "In 2007, 63% of our nurses at St. Luke's were Asian. Today that number is 66%," he said. "We do not have any way of identifying what percentage of our nurses are Filipino because we don't break down these categories by ethnicity or country of origin. In fact, the only data we have on ethnicity are self-reported by our employees using categories approved by the Federal government such as Asian, Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American or White (non-Hispanic)."

More than two dozen Filipino and other community leaders joined with CNA and sent a letter to CPMC this week demanding a meeting with Browner and Diana Karner, the Sutter West Bay vice president of nursing, and that CPMC publicly renounce its discriminatory practices.

At the press conference, CNA offered testimony by former nursing supervisors at CPMC and nurses who have faced the discriminatory practices. Chris Hanks, a former director of Critical Care Services at CPMC, said Karner told him on a number of occasions, "you are not to hire any Filipinos."

Former nurse supervisor Ronald Villanueva said that he heard Karner tell another supervisor, "do not hire foreign graduate nurses"—an unambiguous reference to Filipinos.

Sutter brought forward several Filipino nurses who called the CNA complaints groundless. Emilia Maninang RN, Clinical Nurse Manager in the Skilled Nursing Facility/Sub-Acute care unit at St. Luke's, said she has worked at the hospital nearly 20 years and was never told not to hire Filipinos. "I'm Filipino and if I had heard anyone say that I would've been appalled. I think the claims are part of CNA's agenda to try and make CPMC look bad," she said.

Rose Duya RN, who has been at St. Luke's for 12 years said the allegations are false and demonstrate that the union is "desperate."

"I'm Filipino, most of my colleagues here at St. Luke's are Filipino and I have been to many of the other CPMC campuses and have seen many other Filipinos there as well, so I don't see how the union can make those claims," she said.