MEDIA ADVISORY FOR: 

November 30, 2022

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Healthcare workers will protest outside of the Cedars-Sinai Women’s Guild Disco Ball on Wednesday, November 30, at 4:30 p.m. at The Beverly Hilton. Workers are demanding that Cedars-Sinai invest in patient care by increasing wages and staffing for those on the frontlines. The event is a gala fundraiser to benefit Cedars-Sinai, which earned over a billion dollars in profits last year.

Despite Cedars-Sinai’s high profits, they refuse to pay their healthcare workers a living wage. Many hospital workers earn barely above the minimum wage and must take on a second job to afford to live within commuting distance of Marina del Rey. By comparison, Cedars-Sinai gave their 15 top executives more than $39 million during the pandemic. According to the most recently available Cedars-Sinai IRS filings, CEO, Tom Priselac, made $5.6 million during the same time, or about $2,000 per hour.

“How can they call us healthcare heroes or claim they care when I can go to Target and make $17 an hour or more without risking my life,” said Kaylie Martinez, an ultrasound technologist at Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey Hospital. “There are days where one person needs to do the job of two. That is unsafe and is pushing workers out of this field for jobs with less risk and more pay. It’s making understaffing worse, which affects the quality of patient care.”

Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey hospital workers – which include job classes such as environmental services workers, surgical technicians, dietitians, lab assistants, nursing assistants, registration assistants, pharmacists, and many other frontline staff – say it’s time for management to listen to caregivers and increase staffing, put patient care first, and invest in the workers who take care of patients at the hospital every day.

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Media Contact: Renée Saldaña – [email protected]

SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is a healthcare justice union of more than 100,000 healthcare workers, patients, and healthcare activists united to ensure affordable, accessible, high-quality care for all Californians, provided by valued and respected healthcare workers.