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After months of collaboration in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, we are dismayed that Stanford Health Care is now turning its back on frontline healthcare workers and refusing to acknowledge our input when it comes to furloughs. Your refusal to work collaboratively and negotiate is extremely disrespectful to all of us who have been coming to work every day, often without proper protection, putting our lives at risk to care for patients.

You’ve presented your furlough plan as a “shared sacrifice” as if this extreme measure has the same impact on the CEO who makes over $3 million a year and a housekeeper or a nursing assistant who struggle to pay rent and feed our families in the Silicon Valley on $60,000 or $70,000 a year. This shows a stark lack of empathy and understanding for the reality of our lives.

We are urging you to remember what frontline workers have sacrificed during this pandemic and to re-consider your approach to the financial challenges the hospital faces.

Specifically, we are asking that you:

• Tier your approach to furloughs, exempting the lowest paid among us — substantially reducing the burden on anyone earning less than$100,000 a year.
• Ensure that no healthcare workers lose, or pay more for, health benefits in the middle of a pandemic as a result of your furlough plan.
• Accept voluntary furlough days from those who truly don’t want to work under these conditions and use those voluntary days to offset mandatory burdens on the rest of us.
• Stop all use of registry employees in any classification/department that is experiencing furloughs.
• Provide transparency for the reasoning behind these furloughs including how much the hospitals are actually losing as a result of COVID-19 and how much Stanford Health Care will benefit from the $175 billion in federal stimulus funds included in the CARES Act and its recent supplement.

We hope you will join us in leading with compassion, equity, and transparency as we fight COVID-19 together.

Sincerely,

The SEIU-UHW member caregivers of Stanford Health Care