Jackson Stirs Up the Troops At Good Samaritan Hospital

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Ahead of a union decertification vote this week at Good Samaritan Hospital, union leaders brought in civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson to rally members and put pressure on management amid contract negotiations.


Jackson, who was in town for other Rainbow Coalition/PUSH business, spoke to workers represented by the SEIU United Health Workers-West in the cafeteria and outside the hospital on March 19. He was accompanied by L.A. Councilman Ed Reyes and several local labor and religious leaders.


“I would hope that they would choose the bargaining table over the battlefield,” Jackson told the Business Journal. “I believe the way workers break the cycle of poverty is through collective bargaining.”


The SEIU represents 467 licensed vocational nurses, respiratory therapists, and other medical technicians at the downtown Los Angeles hospital. The union contends Good Samaritan employees are among the lowest paid hospital workers in the region, often as much as 40 percent below comparable urban hospitals such as Brotman Medical Center.


Union negotiator Dana Simon said that given the region’s shortage of medical technicians, the wage disparity has lead to high turnover rates, with one in four technicians with the hospital for less than one year.


But hospital administrators noted that at least 30 percent of employees had called for the decertification vote, which will be held Tuesday and Wednesday.


“We’re just a standalone hospital in downtown L.A., so it’s always hard when you get compared with a chain like Kaiser,” said Lexie Schuster, vice president for human relations. “But if it were true that we pay 40 percent lower than other hospitals, we wouldn’t have anybody working here.”


The union notes that an LVN working a 12-hour shift at Good Samaritan can expect to make $16.84 per hour after two years at the hospital, 17 percent lower than the $19.66 at Brotman Medical Center, also a standalone facility. Brotman is owned by managed care provider Prospect Medical Holdings Inc.


Simon also maintains that it was union supporters who had called for the decertification vote, which it expects will fail, to convince management to take the union and the negotiations more seriously. Among changes sought by the union: an end to the practice of forced overtime, which most of the California hospitals SEIU works with have already abolished.



Institutional Interest

Cytrx Corp. Chief Executive Steven Kriegsman is no longer the largest shareholder in the Los Angeles drug discovery company he’s been working to turn around for several years. And he couldn’t be happier.


In a March 13 regulatory filing, Fidelity Management Trust Co. disclosed it had so far accumulated 9.18 million shares, a 13 percent stake in the company. Kriegsman, in comparison, has just 5.7 percent of outstanding shares.


“I think it shows if you build the business and you keep at it, eventually the larger institutional investors will be impressed with your science and start to take a position in the company for the long term,” Kriegsman said.


Cytrx shares, which closed at $4.87 on March 20, have seen a 159 percent appreciation since the beginning of the year. The company in January announced it was spinning off its gene-silencing RNAi technology into a majority-owned subsidiary. RNA interference targets the gene at the root of a disease and attempts to switch it off without affecting other genes or cells. The approach could provide cancer treatments with fewer side effects than chemotherapy.


CytRx was practically a shell company in 2002, with its shares trading at around 60 cents, when Kriegsman, a Los Angeles-based life sciences investment banker, became a major shareholder when one of his holdings was acquired by CytRx. He said he saw promise in the company’s intellectual property and decided to take over day-to-day management.


Fidelity has its Cytrx shares in its Aggressive Growth Fund, an appropriate choice since CytRx as yet has no products on the market. The company is in clinical trials on three pill-administered small-molecule compounds, including a treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The RNAi program is still in the laboratory stage.


Barclays Global Investment, Basso Capital Management and Highbridge Capital Management round out the company’s top five shareholders, although these three own less than 1 million shares each.


Business has not been totally smooth for the $333 million market cap company. Chief Financial Officer Matthew Natalizio on March 19 alerted regulators that the company’s 10k annual report for 2006 would be late because staff was overwhelmed with the task of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements on documenting and certifying its internal controls. Natalizio said the company has brought on extra staff to finish both tasks.



Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached at (323) 549-5255, ext. 232, or at [email protected].

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