Fox Chase Cancer Center’s nurses and techs plan to go on a five-day strike starting June 4

Nurses and technical staff at Temple Health’s Fox Chase Cancer Center voted Wednesday to start a five-day strike on June 4, following roughly eight months of unsuccessful negotiations with Temple for their first contracts since organizing as unions.

Ninety-four percent of the nurses and techs who participated in the vote favored declaring a strike, according to the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents the nurses and techs. PASNAP did not say how many union members voted.

The strike would occur about one year after the two unions formed last June — one representing registered nurses and one representing techs, including X-ray techs, surgical techs, and respiratory therapists.

Fox Chase did not respond to The Inquirer’s request for comment on deadline.

The nurses and techs are asking for increased staffing and higher wages, the union said. They also want to have more influence over hospital policies and procedures.

Temple has been negotiating separately with the two sets of unionized employees. PASNAP filed an unfair labor practices complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on March 6 alleging “bad faith bargaining” by Temple.

The roughly 135 techs and nearly 400 nurses at the specialty cancer center in Northeast Philadelphia gave their unions’ bargaining committees approval to hand Temple a 10-day strike notice in March. At the time, they stopped short of declaring one.

But the workers say the negotiations haven’t progressed sufficiently since.

“We’ve had enough of the disrespect,” palliative-care nurse Maria Klinger-Gonzalez said in a statement.

Strike authorization votes are common during contract negotiations, and often do not lead to a strike.

The nurses at Temple University Hospital-Jeanes Campus voted in late February to authorize a strike, but ultimately did not initiate one. The Jeanes nurses, who share a campus with Fox Chase, approved a contract in April.

Hospital workers in the region last went on strike over Christmas, when nurses represented by PASNAP at two Prime Healthcare-owned hospitals walked out of work for five days. The roughly 240 Suburban Community Hospital and Lower Bucks Hospital employees returned to work subsequently, and still don’t have a new contract.