Hear from Workers >> Asela Espiritu
Asela Espiritu | Registered Nurse at Kaiser Permanente, Orange County, Calif.
United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals-AFSCME |
Asela Espiritu is a registered nurse at Kaiser Permanente who didn’t have to endure harassment and intimidation in order to win a voice on the job through her union. Espiritu works at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center-Orange County in Anaheim, Calif., which was the only hospital—out of Kaiser’s 13 hospitals in Southern California—in which the nurses didn’t have a union. Espiritu and her co-workers were able to form a union in 2000 at Kaiser under their company’s national neutrality and majority sign-up agreement. The employees formed a union quickly, within three months of when they had started their organizing effort. “The 2000 negotiations gave us a lot of power and the voice to speak up on behalf of our patients. It’s not perfect, but we are on the road to solving the issues that affect the rank and file day-in and day-out. We have stability, and we have become a very desirable workplace,” says Espiritu. “Everyone wants to work here now. Nurses say, ‘I want to be a nurse at Kaiser.’ Our vacancy rate is at an all-time low. We are the highest-paid nurses in the county. It’s not just about the benefits either, it’s about the nurse-to-patient ratio we were able to get through Kaiser and the union working together.” Espiritu is proud to be a union member and a Kaiser nurse because she knows that good nurse-to-patient ratios are crucial to the quality of patient care. | 
