A union is suing Prime Healthcare Centinela Hospital Medical Center, alleging the Inglewood hospital laid off workers, including one with more than 50 years seniority, rather than pay them $25 an hour as required by a new city law.
Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers-West filed the Los Angeles Superior Court complaint on Tuesday, alleging violations of the Inglewood Municipal Code and seeking reinstatement of the terminated employees with back wages and interest. A hospital representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Inglewood voters passed a ballot measure raising the pay of healthcare employees working in the city to $25 an hour in November and the law went into effect a month later.
“Now, mere months later, aggrieved employers are taking their revenge,” according to the suit, which further states that hospital laid off 48 workers on March 31 after previously cutting the work hours of various others.
Among those workers laid off was an employee and SEIU-UHW member who had worked at the medical center for more than five decades, according to the suit.
Supervisors in the hospital’s emergency department told workers that “big changes” were coming because of the ordinance and management made similar staffing changes in the radiology and admitting departments in the weeks immediately following the effective date of the law, the suit states.
The company’s CEO explained in a letter to employees that the Centinela layoffs were due to a decrease in the number of patients, but the sum total of those hospitalized has actually remained relatively level and even gone up a bit, the suit states.
“The much more logical and likely explanation for the layoffs … is that defendants are funding the cost of increased wages for the rest of its workforce by laying off an unlucky group,” the suit states. “This is clearly prohibited by the ordinance.”