The number of people varied throughout the hours of the picket (11 - 2 p.m.), but around 180 signed the sign-in sheet, and usually the sidewalk was filled.

"What's this about? -- Patient Care!" was one of our chants. Over the last months of bargaining about the changes in EVS, I learned a lot about what people do in that department, and how what they do or don't do affects everybody else that works in the hospital. If EVS employees are told not to pick up the trash on some floor, then a patient care employee will have to stop doing a patient care task and pick up the trash.If EVS employees are told to empty the dirty linens "when the bag is full" instead of every day, then employees (and patients) are going to be smelling dirty linen for several days in their department. If there is no environmental service employee available to clean patient rooms, then incoming patients will have to sit and wait.

Then there is the human cost of requiring people to drop standards of job performance that were believed to be necessary until current budgetary plans dictated a change. Since there have been many complaints about the cleanliness of our hospital, you could not say that the current understaffing of EVS is "working." It is clearly NOT working for the EVS employees who have sustained injuries, either physical or from stress, who try to do "their" job and part of what used to be someone else's.

There comes a point when each side asks the other: "So what's your proposed resolution?" The Union has proposed a fair solution. Why not take it?