CRONA 2025 Negotiations

Dear CRONA Nurses,

CRONA has been bargaining with the hospitals for the last four weeks. The focus these past weeks has been on “non-economic” issues. The parties will soon be moving to economic issues, including wages and benefits. Here is a round-up of some of the top non-economic issues:

Sad News About CRONA’s Founder and First President

Today, we lost a valued member of our CRONA family. …It is with deep sorrow that CRONA announces the passing of our founder and first president, Marion Mullin. Marion was a true pioneer who dedicated her life to advocating for fair wages and improved working conditions for nurses. Through her tireless efforts and unshakable commitment, she shaped the future of the nursing labor movement. Marion’s legacy will endure, both within the walls of the hospital and across the entire nursing community, and we honor the incredible vision, leadership, and compassion she demonstrated throughout her life. Marion’s unwavering dedication to the nursing profession and CRONA will never be forgotten.

We were privileged to interview Marion in 2022 for a short video about the founding of CRONA. Watch the video to hear what Marion and Stanford nurses were up against when they organized CRONA. To hear CRONA’s origin story is to be inspired about nursing and about advocacy.

Connecting with YOU! – Upcoming Events 

We are here to answer your questions! Thank you to everyone who attended our webinar last night, where we shared the latest updates on negotiations and addressed Nurses’ questions. Our next webinar is set for March 12.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so we’re showing our love for CRONA Nurses. We show up every day, provide the highest quality of care for our patients and always have each other’s backs. We 💙 CRONA Nurses!

On March 17, we’ll mark St. Patrick’s Day with donuts and coffee for CRONA Nurses. Be sure to come say hello and bring any questions you may have about contract negotiations.

Dear CRONA Nurses,

This week, our CRONA Negotiation Team met with Stanford management three times to continue advocating for strong contracts that Nurses deserve. We focused on bringing Nurses’ experience and expertise into the room to inform how the contracts affect us and our patient care.

In our sessions this week, we pushed for proposals that would make a real difference for Nurses, including:

• The right of Nurses who are threatened or assaulted at work to be offered a reassignment.
• Increasing access to part-time positions at both hospitals.
• Protecting Nurses’ right to take pre-scheduled vacations when their PTO banks are depleted due to mandatory cancellations.
• Ensuring the hospitals comply with the safe staffing protections CRONA achieved in the last round of negotiations.
• Protections against unreasonable on-call report times.
• Limitations on the hospitals’ ability to force Nurses to “rotate” between day and night shifts with little notice.

Workplace Violence in the Spotlight. In the last two rounds of contract negotiations, CRONA has pushed for increased protections against workplace violence. CRONA Nurses took a stand against the much-too-common assumption that some level of workplace violence is acceptable. In 2019, CRONA won protections for Nurses who are threatened and assaulted at work, allowing those Nurses to request reassignments. This year, CRONA is pushing to require the hospitals to affirmatively offer reassignments. After an assault, Nurses may be traumatized and not in a position to advocate for themselves.

As one of the workplace violence prevention resources recommended by the Joint Commission points out: “There is a long-standing belief in health care that verbal abuse ‘comes with the territory.’ Although incidents of verbal/physical violence or abuse may occur in the workplace, that does not mean that it should be tolerated by staff.”

CRONA is working hard to shed a light on the verbal and physical abuse that Nurses frequently experience and hopes managers will partner with Nurses on this by making appropriate reassignments and reporting the abuse.

Nurses’ Experiences Matter. At the negotiating table this week, we also shared anonymized stories from Nurses who wrote CRONA about the importance of part-time positions and provided a detailed analysis of why our proposal to increase the availability of part-time positions was feasible. The response to CRONA’s request that Nurses share their experiences with part-time positions was overwhelming. Here are just a few examples of what your team shared with Stanford management:

“I have seen many great nurses leave because they needed a lower commitment to pursue goals like going back to school, traveling or starting a family.”

“I would love the option of reducing my commitment, because I know with my commute and growing our family it would be impossible to keep working full-time at LPCH. … With my seniority I will probably have to wait 10 or more years to be able to go part-time. This discouraging reality has resulted in me looking elsewhere for a part-time position. I know I am not alone, there’s so many nurses starting families or growing their families that would love the option to reduc[e] their commitment!”

“I was able to decrease my commitment after 17 years to 0.6, and I now truly believe I’ll have longevity in my career at the bedside.”

“When I got pregnant with my first child, I hoped for a 0.75 FTE – that was 5 years ago. I’m a full time nurse, and the thought of working just one less shift per pay period would be a dream. But knowing that I’m going to have to wait at least another 10 years (realistically) for a reduced commitment position is pretty defeating.”

“I really wanted a part time when I had kids but wasn’t able to, now almost 20 years later my kids are older and don’t need me as much but that means I’m older and still in need of a part time job! I know it’s on the horizon for me. I only have to wait for 1 or maybe 2 more nurses to retire. I see the younger generation going through the same thing I did when I started, hoping… wishing… for a part time. They see me and realize, if I don’t have one yet that means for them it’s unattainable, and therefore these awesome nurses are going to leave!

With strength in numbers and the unity of our voices, we can make positive changes in our workplace. Please continue to share your stories so we can make sure Stanford Health is hearing from the Nurses who keep its hospitals running. Your perspective matters!

Have you had issues with PTO? Could PTO be more flexible?

How does the ability to use your PTO impact the sustainability of your nursing career? Have you ever had to give up part of a pre-approved vacation because your PTO ran short? If so, what contributed to your PTO balance running short – illness for you and/or your family, frequent cancellations, using PTO when someone picks up your shift, LOA, or…? What other factors contribute to PTO issues?

Let us know!

Your CRONA Negotiation Team wants to know how Nurses are affected by current rules about the use of PTO at the hospitals. Please drop us a line by clicking the button below to let us know your experiences and thoughts – we look forward to hearing from you!

[see the newsletter in your email for link]

Second Wednesday Webinar

Here’s a reminder about our monthly membership webinar, coming up in February. Hear from CRONA leaders about current issues, now including contract negotiations, and have the opportunity to both ask your own questions and hear the questions asked by other nurses.

Wednesday, February 12

8:00 – 10:00 PM

The login information for the webinar will be sent on the day of the webinar by email and text. See you next month!

Dear CRONA Nurses,

Our CRONA Negotiation Team met with Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s management three times this week to continue pushing for strong contracts that will make nursing more sustainable, improve working conditions, and ensure adequate workplace protections, support Nurses’ need for sustainable careers and ensure protects and builds upon our workplace protections. In this week’s sessions, we advocated for:

• Improvements to the industry-leading safe staffing provisions we won in the last contract, including advocating for language to ensure that Nurses are allowed to provide feedback on staffing plans and have adequate information and education about those plans – which must take into account of patient acuity and the need to provide all Nurses with meal period and rest breaks.
• A new proposal intended to protect the trust between Nurses, patients, and their families by ensuring that no Nurse can be required to participate in enforcement of immigration law and the hospitals may not retaliate against Nurses who refuse to do so.
• Improvements to on-call requirements and access to sleep rooms.
• Humane and predictable schedules for Nurses designated as “Rotators.”
• Increased protections against workplace violence, including making it easier to exercise the the right to refuse a new patient assignment in the event of an assault or threat by a patient or patient’s visitor.

We also responded to the few non-economic proposals put forth by the hospitals. The hospitals have not yet responded to many of CRONA’s opening proposals, including proposals regarding PTO usage, Relief Nurse absences, increased opportunities for part-time positions, weekend staffing, education reimbursement procedures, and new technology.

You may have seen that Stanford is particularly highlighting their Workplace Violence counterproposal. We appreciate management’s acknowledgement that ensuring nurses’ safety is a key concern and for addressing this early on in our bargaining process. As mentioned above, we are still reviewing their counter to our original proposal.

When your CRONA negotiating team is at the table, our job is to give voice to the experiences of our more than 6,000 Nurses fighting together! We want to hear from you! We will ask for your thoughts and experiences on different topics – see below to share your story about part-time positions. When we are at the negotiating table, we are over 6000 nurses fighting together. Our unity is our strength, and it gives us the power we need to build a better hospitals.

What happens next? We will continue to meet with the hospitals three days a week until our current contract expires on March 31. Look out for our upcoming negotiations updates, come every for our We will continue to send regular updates regarding contract negotiations and hold to our monthly member webinars, and follow CRONA’ social media for other updates.

How do you feel about working part-time in nursing?

Is working in a reduced commitment something you are doing now, are waiting for, or hope to be able to do in the future? We want to hear from you! Why do you want a reduced commitment position? How long have you waited for a reduced commitment position to be available?

Let us know!

Your CRONA Negotiation Team wants to know how nurses are affected by the availability of part-time positions at the hospitals. Please drop us a line by clicking the button below to let us know your experiences and thoughts – we look forward to hearing from you!

[see the newsletter in your email for link]

Second Wednesday Webinar

Here’s a reminder about our monthly membership webinar, coming up in February. Hear from CRONA leaders about current issues, now including contract negotiations, and have the opportunity to both ask your own questions and hear the questions asked by other nurses.

Wednesday, February 12

8:00 – 10:00 PM

The login information for the webinar will be sent on the day of the webinar by email and text. See you next month!

 

Dear CRONA Nurses,

Thank you so much for turning out for our Negotiations Kick-off Event! It was great to see so many nurses having fun together and supporting one another. The event really showed the unity that makes CRONA strong. Now it’s time to get to work!

Starting Tuesday, your CRONA Negotiating Team will begin meeting with Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s management three days a week. Our goal is to win a strong contract that ensures we can continue to deliver the highest quality of care to our patients.

Your CRONA Negotiating Team is made up of CRONA Nurses, your coworkers from both hospitals, who we introduced to you last Friday and can be viewed on our website. The Team represents diverse areas of nursing practice, from ICU and ED, inpatient floors, oncology, surgery and procedural areas, to outpatient departments. The Negotiating Team is equally diverse in its geography: we have nurses from the Palo Alto campus and others from offsite locations across a variety of Bay Area cities; some live locally, and others have long commutes due to the high cost of living. This diversity is a key part of our strength.

In this week’s sessions, we expect the hospitals to respond to our opening proposals which centered on:

• Ensuring safe patient staffing throughout the hospital.
• Making nursing a sustainable profession, including by addressing scheduling, conditions for Nurses on-call, part-time positions, and more.
• Keeping Nurses safe in the workplace.
• Addressing emerging technologies like AI that can affect nursing practice.
• Holding the hospitals accountable and ensuring existing protections and benefits are secure.

What happens next? We will meet with the hospitals three days a week until our current contract expires on March 31. We will send regular updates regarding contract negotiations and will share opportunities for you to get involved. We will continue our monthly member webinars on the second Wednesday of each month, and hold additional online informational updates when we are further along in the negotiations process – so keep reading these updates and checking our social media for announcements!

Let’s Look At Weekends

Stanford 17.2.1/Children’s 16.2: “The Employer will use its best efforts to grant each full-time and part-time Regular Nurse at least every other weekend off.”

For nurses who work in units that staff the weekends similarly to weekdays – inpatient, Emergency Department, among others – have you ever asked your manager to look at allowing nurses to work less frequently than every other weekend? If so, how did that work out? Does working most weekends fit your lifestyle better because of school, child/family care or other reasons? Would improvements to weekend scheduling make you more likely to stay in your job?

Your CRONA Negotiation Team is looking at various ways to make nursing a more sustainable career, and that means looking at how to improve scheduling. Please drop us a line by clicking the button below to let us know about your scheduling needs related to weekends. In other newsletters we will ask more questions about your experiences – we look forward to hearing from you!

[see the newsletter in your email for link]

Second Wednesday Webinar

Here’s a reminder about our monthly membership webinar, coming up in February. Hear from CRONA leaders about current issues, now including contract negotiations, and have the opportunity to both ask your own questions and hear the questions asked by other nurses.

Wednesday, February 12

8:00 – 10:00 PM

The login information for the webinar will be sent on the day of the webinar by email and text. See you next month!

Dear CRONA Nurses,

It’s almost time for our 2025 Negotiations Kickoff Event, where we will have fun and support each other as we get ready to negotiate our new contracts. The members of our Negotiation Team will be at the event, and I hope you will take the opportunity to say hello and inspire them with your support. We have a great team, drawn from both of our hospitals and from diverse areas of practice.

Next week, we return to the tough but rewarding work of bargaining as we move to meeting with the hospitals three days a week. Expect the pace of things to increase as we move forward, and make sure to read our eblasts and follow us on social media for the latest in news and updates.

See you on Sunday!

In Unity,

Colleen Borges

President, CRONA

How to know who gets a mandatory A-day?

In 2022, we added language to both hospital contracts to clarify scheduling. This was done in part to address the order of cancellation when Regular and Relief Nurses are working above their commitments. Here’s the language, from Stanford Section 18.4/Stanford Children’s Section 17.9:

“No later than July 10, 2022, the posted schedule shall reflect when a Nurse is scheduled to work over the Nurse’s minimum regular commitment.”

When the manager makes the schedule and schedules a nurse for more shifts than the nurse is required to work (which is only done if the nurse makes such a request), the manager is required to designate which of those scheduled shifts are the “over commitment” shift(s). This makes things simple when the unit is over staffed and there are no volunteers to take voluntary Absent time. The order of cancellation is to cancel a Relief Nurse working above commitment, then a Regular Nurse working above commitment. Knowing which shifts are the “over commitment” shifts makes this simple. Absent this information, it can be confusing to determine order of cancellation. This information must be included on the published schedule at time time of publication.

If your manager is not designating over commitment shifts on your unit’s schedule, please email the manager to request that this is done in the future, and please Cc crona@crona.org on the email so we know where the contract is not being followed.

Our current contracts are available in searchable PDF form on the Resources page of the crona.org website.

Dear CRONA Nurses,

Your CRONA Negotiating Team has been hard at work. Today, CRONA presented a package of opening non-economic proposals to Stanford and Stanford Children’s management.

CRONA’s proposals reflect the priorities of Nurses – raised in your responses to the negotiations survey, in our Wednesday Webinars, and in conversation with each other.

CRONA is working to:

• Ensure safe patient staffing throughout the hospital.
• Make nursing a sustainable profession, including by addressing scheduling, conditions for Nurses on-call, part-time positions, and more.
• Keep Nurses safe in the workplace.
• Address emerging technologies like AI that can affect nursing practice.
• Hold the hospitals accountable and make sure existing protections and benefits are secure.

CRONA presented detailed proposals on all of these items, as well as on the Professional Nurse Development Program (PNDP).

The hospitals had only a few opening non-economic proposals, primarily focused on existing  notification procedures.

What happens next? Beginning Tuesday, January 28, we will be meeting with the hospitals three days a week until the contracts expire at the end of March. When we next meet, CRONA expects the hospitals to respond to CRONA’s opening proposals.

Join CRONA Nurses at our Negotiations Kickoff Event!

What better way to have an opportunity to join with nurses from our diverse nursing practice areas than to have a celebration!? Join your fellow CRONA Nurses for an evening of fun, food, and camaraderie for nurses. We’ll have complementary food and coffee/soft drinks, with wine/beer/signature drinks available for purchase. We also have new CRONA swag items plus our special merch store on site. Best of all, there will be lots of CRONA Nurses – including our 2025 Negotiation Team!

We ask that you RSVP if you plan to attend so we may plan for food – we want to make sure everyone has enough to eat! Get your CRONA Nurse friends and coworkers together and come to the party as a group!

Post our Kickoff Event flyer to your unit’s CRONA board by downloading and printing it! See below for an image of the flyer and link to a printable PDF.

This event is an in-person event for CRONA Nurses only. You are invited to enjoy complementary food at the restaurant however to-go boxes will not be available.

CRONA Scholarship

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2024 CRONA Scholarship! CRONA continues to strive to support nurses in their work and the development of the nursing profession. Each year CRONA awards educational scholarships of $1000 each to help defray the cost of continuing studies in nursing or a related field at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctorate level.

The 2025 scholarship application period will be announced in December. Many nurses applied for the scholarship. It is wonderful to know that so many nurses are working to further their education.

Dear CRONA Nurses,

All CRONA Nurses, together in unity, are the heart of our union. Our contracts provide structure that supports us in our work and shapes our lives. Now, we begin negotiating the agreements that will carry us forward to our future. Our current contracts expire on March 31, 2025, and the Negotiation Team is hard at work.

The theme of our 2025 negotiations is “Diversity is our strength, Unity is our power”. Nurses are diverse in our areas of practice, and in our personal and professional backgrounds. As a labor union, our diverse voices are united and strong, giving us power to speak loud enough to be heard and respected. It is the power we have when we unite, that as individuals we do not have alone. That strength and powerful voice help us come together in support of each other and our profession, with the shared goal of making nursing a sustainable profession that is the heart of patient care.

Expect to receive more frequent updates as we move forward into negotiations. We will introduce our Negotiation Team – made up of CRONA Nurses who work in areas throughout both hospitals and who have stepped up to represent all of us at the bargaining table. We will share updates regarding our proposals after we present them to the hospitals at the bargaining table. We will ask for your engagement and support. We will ask you to share your stories. We will have events where you can gather and enjoy the company of your fellow CRONA Nurses as we all work together.

In Unity,

Colleen Borges
President, CRONA

Join CRONA Nurses at our Negotiations Kickoff Event!

What better way to have an opportunity to join with nurses from our diverse nursing practice areas than to have a celebration!? Join your fellow CRONA Nurses for an evening of fun, food, and camaraderie for nurses. We’ll have complementary food and coffee/soft drinks, with wine/beer/signature drinks available for purchase. We also have new CRONA swag items plus our special merch store on site. Best of all, there will be lots of CRONA Nurses – including our 2025 Negotiation Team!

We ask that you RSVP if you plan to attend so we may plan for food – we want to make sure everyone has enough to eat! Get your CRONA Nurse friends and coworkers together and come to the party as a group!

Sunday, January 26, 2025

5:00 – 9:00 PM

Domenico Winery + Osteria
1697 Industrial Blvd, San Carlos, CA

Post our Kickoff Event flyer to your unit’s CRONA board by downloading and printing it! See the bottom of this newsletter for an image of the flyer and link to a printable PDF.

This event is an in-person event for CRONA Nurses only. You are invited to enjoy complementary food at the restaurant however to-go boxes will not be available.

CRONA and AFL-CIO Labor Councils

Today marks a historic step in the growth of CRONA Nurses. In the culmination of a process in the works for many months, CRONA is now affiliated with the South Bay Labor Council and San Mateo County Labor Council. Our first delegates were sworn in last night!

Labor councils are a confederation of many unions representing workers from multiple disciplines across the Bay Area. By participating with these councils, we demonstrate a collective commitment to our shared values and objectives, strengthening our bargaining position moving into this next round of negotiations. CRONA is looking for members who wish to serve as delegates for each of these labor councils. Meeting dates/times are listed below– If you want to join, please fill out a consent to serve form at CRONA.org. For any questions, please reach out to CRONA Legislative Representative, Meredith Holder—MHolder@crona.org

San Mateo Labor Council
1701 Leslie Street
San Mateo, CA

Meetings are at 6 p.m. on the 2^nd Monday of every month

South Bay Labor Council
2302 Zanker Road
San Jose, CA

Meetings are at 6 p.m. on the 3^rd Monday of every month (unless there is a holiday)