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California nurses call for investigation of alleged discriminatory hiring practices against Filipinos at SF’s St.Luke’s hospital

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If you don’t think racism and discrimination still exists in our era of diversity, consider this:   A  de facto ban against hiring Filipino nurses at the St.Luke’s Campus of Sutter Health’s Calif. Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) appears to be policy in San Francisco.

No Filipinos, as blatant as that.

Just like the old sign that the Filipino National Historical Society displays, the one from the 1920s that reads, “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”

You can take that sign and stick it on the door at St.Luke’s, right now, says the California Nurses Association, the nurses union.

And now it wants to do something about it.

At a press conference on Thursday, the union will call for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to investigate the hospital. The union will also announce its intention to file a class action grievance against Sutter and CPMC.

The union provided compelling evidence which included signed statements by former managers and current job stats, that  suggests Filipinos are being unfairly discriminated at the St. Luke’s campus.

From numbers provided by CPMC, the numbers are revealing. Before the take-over of the hospital in 2007 the Filipino RNs at St.Luke’s were 66 percent of the nursing population.

Between 2007 and 2008, just 48 percent of new hires were Filipino.

From Feb. 2008, when the nurses union and the community organized to stop the closure of St.Luke’s, to the present, the percentage of new RN hires who were Filipino dropped dramatically to just 10 percent.

They didn’t all just give up their RN credentials and take jobs as Wal-Mart greeters.

Nato Green, the labor representative who works at St.Luke’s said it’s no coincidence. “I believe this reflects Sutter’s decision to use race to divide workers and stop collective bargaining activity,” Green told me. “ Going from 66 percent to 10 percent (of new hires) is a fairly remarkable coincidence.”

It all comes after the union forced Sutter to keep St.Luke’s open. The nurses union expected some push back, but not this.

“CPMC and Sutter have chosen to retaliate by carrying out a punitive, illegal and immoral campaign of discrimination,” said Zenei Cortz, the California Nurses Association president.  “There is no excuse for racial or ethnic discrimination. A hospital should be a center of therapeutic healing for patients, not a model for bigotry.”

The union also produced affidavits signed under penalty of perjury.  Ronald Rivera, a former nurse manager, who worked there from April 2006 to April 2010 when he resigned on good terms, provided his testimony.

“One day I spoke with Diana Karner (VP of nursing) on the phone about hiring new RNs,” he attested.  “Diana said to me that we probably should not hire any more foreign graduate nurses. She explained that patients complain because “it is hard  to understand them and be understood by them.”

Another signed affidavit came from Ronald Villanueva, who actually was sitting in and overheard the conversation between Karner and Rivera. “I was shocked and I wondered if she knew I was a foreign graduate nurse,” he wrote.

A third declaration came from from Chris Hanks, who was the Director of Critical Care from 2008 to 2009 and reported directly to Karner. Hanks was alarmed when told point blank “you are not to hire any Filipino nurses.”  Hanks challenged Karner at their weekly meetings, until he was Karner told him, “The Filipinos are always related , or know each other, and that’s not good. You’re not to hire them.”

Karner the VP of nursing didn’t return my telephone call.

Kevin McCormack, of CPMC’s media relations said she was out of the office and unavailable. What did he think of a ban on hiring Filipino nurses? “That would be illegal,” he said. “You can’t ban hiring specific groups.”

He called it “ridiculous” and implied it was a stunt by C N A to fan the ongoing labor dispute with CPMC.

“We have a long history of hiring Filipino nurses on all our campuses, including St.Luke’s, and we are still hiring them,” McCormack read from CPMC’s official statement. “We have many RNs at our St. Luke’s campus who are Filipino and know how extraordinary they are. To say we are imposing quotas on them is outrageous.”

It is outrageous, but the numbers don’t lie.

The Filipino nursing staff at St.Luke’s is shrinking and it is such a precipitous drop that it can’t just be by accident or happenstance.

blog, diversity, journalism, news, race

Note from Emil Guillermo: Help,I’m a pioneer!

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AAJA, the Asian American Journalists Association has figured out the best way to get back at me after all my years of being a bickering member.

It’s honoring me.

On Wed., Aug. 4, I’m being honored among 150 others as an Asian American pioneer in  U.S. journalism. (Yes, Tritia Toyota and Connie Chung are on the list too. But so ae lots of others who were founders and original members of AAJA).

How’d that happen?

It’s just a citation for being old and one of the first Asian Americans to consider journalism instead of medicine, the law, restaurant ownership, or investment banking  for a career. 

At this point in time, I’d have to say, choosing journalism may not have been the best choice.

 But it was my choice. And I’m gratified that someone noticed that I was the first Asian American male and first Filipino American to host a national news program when I was senior host of “All Things Considered” in 1989.

I hope that doesn’t become the headline in my obituary someday.  It’s not over yet. (I can’t even withdraw from my IRA without a 10 percent penalty).

I’m still a pioneer who hasn’t quite reached the promised land.

blog, everything else

Emil Guillermo: Confessions of a bad relative

Recently two deaths occurred, one natural, the other not.  I was related to both of them, though as you can see, the guilt is only now setting in.  

My Cousin

For her privacy and to protect the innocent, let’s call her Paula.

She was a real gem.

Paula was just a few years  younger than me, born in 1958. She was smart. She was beautiful. She was a great dancer, and an even better singer. She sang, well, like an angel.

 We grew up in San Francisco. We even went to Lowell High School at the same time.

And until I heard the news this week, I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Paula, or even what she looked like. 

It was all a blank until I went to the wake and saw her portrait. Unmistakably a cousin, in her eyes and face I saw the whole family.

At the wake, I saw another relative, an aunt.  When she recognized me, I dipped my head to air-kiss her hello. Then she pulled back and said, “Say hi to your mom.”

A nice sentiment, sure. But my mother died more than 10 years ago.

By her statement, my aunt in her 80s was going before my eyes. But her forgetfulness was a forgivable, natural thing. The rest of us willfully forget. Life gets in the way, we move away, our lives in different places and connections naturally wane.

That’s the way it was with Paula and I. We might see each other at funerals.

And now she staged her own. 

She had lost a job in January. Her mother died a year ago. She had a bout of depression, and decided her meds weren’t worth it. Nor was anything else.

Did she have options? The family? What if it was like the way it was, and our families lived within blocks apart in San Francisco. And we all saw each other, and knew that it was a family full of love that could provide support. Could that have helped? 

My other cousins at the wake had the same feeling. Were where we when one of us needed us?

Busy, leading our own complicated lives for sure.  But maybe it could have been different if we had  more family gatherings other than our funerals.

 Manang Juaning

The other funeral  last week was for my Manang Juaning, 85,  an Alzheimer’s sufferer. Her son, Ben Medina  and other family members were at the nursing home  for her last breath.

Her life is like the history of Philippine immigration.

Her father, Lolo Telesforo  was the cousin of my father.  That’s why he stayed with my family  in our extra room all those years. He first petitioned for his grand-daughter Esther, who moved in with us and was like a big sister. Then came Ben, her brother. And he moved in too.

They needed their own place when the other five siblings (beautiful sisters all) arrived, along with the leader Manang Juaning. From that base came 15 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great grandchildren.

The wake was a flood of generations—five in all, from Juanita to great-great grandchildren Robert Dorr Jr. and Jayden Dorr.

Not only did I not keep up with relatives I actually lived with, I had practically skipped 3 generations of young relatives.  Many of them were already in their late 20s. 

“We haven’t seen you in a while, uncle,” one said to me. They knew of me as the “Uncle on TV,” or more aptly, Uncle in absentia.  But I knew relatively little of them except we had blood and history in common.

You can prevent from becoming the “modern” Filipino family.

Stay close. Don’t just text or e-mail. See and talk to each other, often. Use the word love as noun or verb,  frequently.

And don’t make funerals the family reunion.

blog, diversity, news, politics, race

Sherrod story a racial speed bump, but shows Obama’s preferred passive stance on race

The road to freedom will be much tougher if we all get tossed off-kilter by the road bumps put in our way by conservative media.

FoxOpinion (it is more opinion than news, isn’t it?)  and blogger Breitbart should be ashamed of their tactics.

But the Obama adminstration suffered from a little post-racial knee-jerking, too.

First, assume the truth from FoxOpinion  is always dicey. More so from a conservative blogger. So why  couldn’t someone at the FDA verify the facts with Shirley Sherrod?

 Sure,we want to get to racial nirvana, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of the truth?

This embarrassment is more on USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack  than Obama, really. Vilsack should know better, but  so should the pres.

I’ve always called Obama the big “race avoider. He doesn’t want to deal with race as an everyday agenda item unless he’s dragged into it and issues are made of his pastor, Skip Gates, Shirley Sherrod.

Obama wants to take us to the next level by  forgetting about race. His is the passive approach. The less he deals with race minutae, the more people see the big picture:  There’s a black man in the White House. Racism? Get over it.

That’s how he wants to drag us to the promised land. But people on both sides don’t want to budge.

The racists are vested as are the race-based. 

Ann Coulter/Jesse Jackson are self-cancelling.

Post-racial thinking?  Race politics in America won’t change until we’re all on the same page.