RNs at St. Joseph’s Medical Center to hold rally protesting layoffs of critical support staff

Registered nurses at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Stockton, Calif., will hold a rally and press conference on Wednesday, Aug. 26, to condemn proposed layoffs of critical support staff, announced California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) today.

Earlier this year, CommonSpirit began conducting mass layoffs across California. Dozens of St. Joseph’s employees, including home health RNs and unit secretaries, were notified in June that they will lose their jobs by the end of August. Every time nurses ask CommonSpirit management about who will do the work of the eliminated employees, they have claimed “the nurses will do it,” which nurses know is not a solution when they are already stretched too thin.  

“Our unit clerks are the backbone for our critical care units and work alongside nurses and doctors to provide uninterrupted care,” said Stacy Erck, RN in the respiratory medical intensive care unit (ICU). “They manage high-volume phone lines, relay valuable information from doctors and our pharmacy, interact with family members on the phone, and screen visitors who visit locked units. They also run blood draws to the lab, pick up lifesaving medications from the pharmacy, and obtain blood from the blood bank at a moment’s notice. St. Joseph’s must reverse these cuts and put patient care ahead of their bottom line.”

Who: RNs at St. Joseph’s Medical Center
What: Rally and press conference for safe staffing and patient safety
When: Wednesday, Aug. 26, 9 a.m.
Where: St. Joseph’s Medical Center, 1800 N. California St., Stockton, Calif.

CNA nurses held a rally and press conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 3 to protest layoffs across 17 CommonSpirit facilities in the state. They also delivered a petition signed by more than 5,000 CommonSpirit nurses protesting the layoffs.

“St. Joseph’s is cutting the secretaries who handle visitor coordination, supplies, room turnover in the ICU, and a list of administrative tasks, and expecting nurses to absorb that work on top of caring for critically ill patients,” added Brandy Howard-Ross, RN in the Pavilion medical-surgical ICU. “That’s not efficiency, it’s corporate greed dressed up as a budget decision, and it puts patients at a huge safety risk. Our patients deserve nurses who are only focused on them.” 

Joy Gonsolin, RN in the neonatal ICU RN, who cares for the hospital’s most vulnerable patients, agrees: “As nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit, we care for the smallest, sickest and most fragile patients — some as small as one pound. Our secretaries don’t just assist us, they are vital to keeping our unit running safely. In emergencies, the secretary handles calling for backup support, coordinates patient transport teams, gathers emergency supplies, gets copies of X-rays and prints medical records. We nurses cannot possibly be expected to provide safe patient care and also handle the important tasks of our unit secretaries. Yet CommonSpirit wants us to do their work, too, because their profits are apparently more important than patient safety.”

Nurses know that CommonSpirit has the resources to address the hospital’s needs. According to its tax filings, from 2020 to 2024, the top 10 CommonSpirit executives were paid in excess of $310.5 million. Its CEO took home a compensation package worth more than $14 million for fiscal year 2025.

CNA represents about 1,300 registered nurses at St. Joseph’s Medical Center and more than 17,000 CommonSpirit RNs in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas.

California Nurses Association/National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the nation with more than 100,000 members in more than 200 facilities throughout California and more than 225,000 RNs nationwide.