Bay Area Hospital Workers Stage Two-Day Walkout
LOU WATERS, CNN ANCHOR: More than 3,000 hospital workers, on strike today in the Bay Area of Northern California. Let's check in with CNN's Greg Lefevre in Oakland for more on the problems and the prognosis. Greg, what's happening?</s>GREG LEFEVRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Lou, you might call this strike two in the continuing dispute between Bay Area hospital workers and two of the largest hospital corporations here in the region: Catholic Healthcare West and the Sutter Health care unit. Thirty-five hundred health care workers have stricken eight hospitals. It's a two day walkout. These people are clerks, nurse's assistants, food workers, and respiratory therapists. The issue is workload. There is a widely reported study that says workers here have about 1 1/2 times the amount of work to do, over just a few years ago, with about the same of workers to do it. The hospitals here have not transferred patients to other places as they did three weeks ago, when the same staged a one-day walkout. However the hospitals have canceled a number of elective surgeries. The hospital corporations have offered the workers a 12 percent pay increase over the next four years. That comes at a time in the Bay Area when the cost of housing is going through the roof. A new home costs almost twice what it did just three years ago, and rents in neighborhoods like this have gone up almost 40 percent in the last 18 months. This strike is just for two days, and we asked some of the workers why just two? They gave us two reasons: one, they are afraid to let the patients go without their care for any longer than that; and also they say they don't make enough money to be off more than two days. Greg Lefevre, CNN, reporting live in Oakland, California. Lou, back to you in Atlanta.</s>WATERS: All right, Greg.