CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Dozens of unionized workers within Cook County Health say the system needs to look closer to home when attempting to address a staffing shortage.
Outside Stroger Hospital, Dianne Palmer, President of the SEIU Local 73, said about a third of the positions at Cook County Health are filled by spending hundreds of millions of dollars through contracts with out- of- state staffing agencies. That’s about 600 non-union workers across all departments.
"Even when you have a contracted employee coming in, it's still a workload on the staff that's there," Palmer said.
Many of the Cook County Health workers represented by Local 73 said they are overwhelmed with the constant training of inexperienced temps in addition to maintaining their own integrity with patients.
"This means full-time workers like me are having to work twice as hard-picking up their slack and guiding them through basic care principles while still having to do our own job," said Veronica Williams, a certified surgical technologist at Stroger.
They said it would be better served if Cook County put that contracted money toward signing and retention bonuses for the local staff in a contract with the union.
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