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Nurses in Dubuque issue strike notice

June 21, 2006 By

Unionized nurses at Dubuque’s Finley Hospital issued a strike notice overnight after contract talks failed to reach an agreement. Registered nurses who are members of the Service Employees International Union Local 199 plan a three-day strike starting at 6 A.M. on July 6th.

The one-year contract expired at 11:59 P.M. last night (Tuesday). Finley nurse Sara Licht says the union’s problem is not being addressed. Licht says “If the proposal remains unchanged, the bargaining team will encourage members to reject the proposal that does nothing to address recruitment, retention and quality care issues the hospital faces.”

Finley is reportedly offering 30-thousand dollars in life insurance to part-time nurses, while full-time nurses would receive 60-thousand dollars in life insurance. Weekend nurses would receive flex spending accounts. The administration also offered a guaranteed three-percent pay increase to nurses given annually on their anniversary date.

Licht says the union is taking part in a lawsuit. She says “A prominent Washington D.C. antitrust lawfirm has filed a class-action lawsuit that alleges hospitals are keeping nurses’ wages down and driving nurses from the bedside, some of the same conditions we face here in Dubuque.”

This would be the first strike in Finley Hospital history. The two sides are scheduled to meet again June 29th to resume negotiations and a strike could be avoided. Administrators will use nurses from an outside company if a strike does happen.

Filed Under: Health & Medicine Tagged With:

Thunderstorms can still be a danger indoors

June 21, 2006 By

Thunderstorms are in the forecast for much of Iowa today (Wednesday). Angela Oder (rhymes odor) with the National Weather Service says during a thunderstorm, you need to be just as careful indoors as you are outdoors.

Many people think it’s safe to stand outside on their enclosed porch and watch the lightning. Oder says — think again. Don’t go outside and look at the lightning, or even stay in the porch and think you’re safe.

Stay inside and away from windows and doors — especially those with metal frames. Anything metal in the house, anything connected to its wiring or plumbing, is something you should stay away from.

While you’re indoors waiting out the electrical storm, she recommends you hold off on phone calls, and tell the kids to stay off the computer and gaming system. Stay away from anything plugged into the wall, including appliances, phones and the TV. They’re connected to the electrical wiring that will conduct all the power from any lightning strike that hits the house and carries all that current down to the ground. If you’re holding onto a video-game controller, it could strike you.

Lightning kills an average of 67 people every year and injures more than 300. This is National Lightning Awareness Week designated by the National Weather Service.

Filed Under: Weather

Manning Healthcare Center gets some national exposure

June 21, 2006 By

The Manning Regional Healthcare Center in west-central Iowa makes its national cable TV debut this weekend on The Learning Channel’s program “Inside Health.” Jeanne Goche is the C-E-O and Administrator of the center. She says its a television show that’s been on about three years and features topics that help people think about the choices they may about their health.

Goche says the program likes to feature health care centers that help people with health choices. Goche says producers of the show liked the idea that good things are happening in a small-town like Manning. Goche says many only has 18-hundred or so people, but they center offers a variety of medical services including a critical access hospital. She says they also have a chemical abuse treatment center that is the only provider between Manning and the Missouri River that has services for women.

Goche says the show also highlights Manning regional nursing home, the Manning Plaza, which is attached to Manning General Hospital. She says the Manning leaders had great vision, as it’s now the trend to build senior living centers and have communities around them, while Manning’s center was built on Main Street 40 years ago.

Goche says the location allows the residents of the nursing home to participate in the community. Goche says the doctors at the hospital made an impression on the producers of the program.

Goche says the doctors “are truly motivated to take care of not just the whole person, but generations of families.” Goche says the doctors still deliver babies and also take care of you when you’re in the nursing home. Olympic skating gold medalist Peggy Fleming hosts the program that’ll be broadcast Saturday, June 24, 2006, at 6 A.M. Iowa time on The Learning Channel.

Filed Under: Health & Medicine, Recreation & Entertainment

Major League starts to sign autographs at Feller Museum

June 21, 2006 By

Several former Major League Baseball stars will be visiting the Bob Feller Museum in Van Meter this summer and even if you can’t get there in person you still have a chance to get items autographed. Museum general manager Scott Havick says baseball buffs can mail in items to be autographed. Havick says the prices will vary depending upon the player.

Former New York Met Ed Kranepool will visit this Saturday and will sign items for 20 dollars each while a Paul Molitor autograph will cost 40 dollars. He says they don’t have all guests sign mail in items as they don’t have the time.

Molitor will visit the museum on July eighth. Havick says it takes a lot of work to make sure the items get signed and then returned to their owner. He says they have tables where they set out the items and he says its an art to get them all signed and sent out.

The type of items you can mail in depends upon who is visiting. He says some of the more famous athletes won’t sign bats or jerseys because they have contracts with companies that restrict what they can sign. Former San Francisco Giant Juan Marachial will visit the museum on August first.

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Deadlines approaching for Iowa Games

June 21, 2006 By

There are two postal deadlines remaining for enter next months Iowa Games and the first is today. Executive Director Jim Halihan says mail in registration for several of the sports offered at the summer games need to be postmarked by today for baseball, basketball, figure skating,softball, swimming, track and field and volleyball.

If you miss the deadline you are not completely out of luck. Halihan says there will still be a few days left to register on-line. The on-line deadline is five days later. The Iowa Games will be held over two weekends in Ames: July 13th through the 16th and the 21st through the 23rd.

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Some Maytag workers may miss out on unemployment benefits

June 21, 2006 By

As many as nine-hundred Maytag workers in Newton may miss out on some of the unemployment benefits given to colleagues who lost their jobs sooner. That’s because a special one-year grant from the federal government is scheduled to run out on December 23rd and not all of Maytag’s workers in Newton will have been laid off by then.

Iowa Workforce Development director Dave Neil says unless that grant’s extended, there will be a real inequity in benefits. “You’ve had some line workers who have been laid off and are using those benefits today and so you’re going to have somebody who maybe (stood) right next to them when they were working, because they have more seniority, will be laid off after December 23rd and will not be entitled to those benefits,” Neil says.

The federal Trade Adjustment Assistance Grant provides special benefits to employees whose jobs are moving overseas or to Mexico. Those workers get unemployment benefits for a longer period of time and more money for job retraining. “As far as educational assistance and job retraining, the (Trade Adjustment Assistance Grant) benefits are far greater than just the regular dislocated worker benefits,” Neil says.

Neil says he’s working with Iowa’s congressional delegation to make sure the grant is extended so those extra benefits continue for Maytag workers laid off after December 23rd. “The squeaking wheel gets the grease as we all know in this world today,” Neil says. “I just think we’ve got to keep the wheel squeaking for these folks or we will wind up with a case of ‘have and have-nots.’”

Whirlpool plans a gradual shut-down of the Maytag plant in Newton, with eight-hundred Maytag employees losing their jobs before Christmas and another nine-hundred being laid off sometime in 2007. “We’ve been collecting names of employers who’re interested in approaching Maytag workers,” Neil says. “We have people interested as far away as Pennsylvania and other states.”

Filed Under: Business Tagged With:

Democrats defend bonuses given by Governor

June 21, 2006 By

With Governor Tom Vilsack not making any public appearances in Iowa this week, some of his fellow Democrats in the legislature are defending the nearly one million dollars worth of bonuses Vilsack’s Administration gave state workers the past two years. Nearly one-thousand employees got bonuses of at least a thousand dollars or more.

Senator Mike Connolly, a Democrat from Dubuque, accuses Republicans of trying to link those bonuses with the controversial bonuses paid to executives of a central Iowa job training program. “We’ve been talking about this CIETC bonus situation and it appears to me that there’s an attempt to try to say that there’s a similar sort of thing in state government and that dog won’t hunt,” Connolly says, “the outrages in the CIETC controversy do not carry over to state government.”

Connolly is a member of the Legislature’s Oversight Committee which requested the review of bonuses. Some Republicans on the panel, like Representative George Eichhorn of Stratford, say it’s time to limit the governor’s ability to give such hefty bonuses. “It is a wake-up call about what is going on and what should not be going on in state government,” Eichhorn says.

But another Republican, Representative Jamie Van Fossen of Davenport, says legislators okayed the bonuses by providing state agencies less money than was needed to pay all the workers on their payroll — giving managers permission to layoff some employees and provide bonuses to others who stayed.

“As I recall the last few years as we’ve done the salary bill we’ve done that at a lesser amount — quite a bit over the last few years — and said, you know, that the departments should just figure out how to do it,” Van Fossen says. “They’ve been able to move funds around…and apply these through retention bonuses and other ways to keep employees as they see fit.”

Van Fossen says the “retention bonuses” should have come as no surprise to legislators. According to Van Fossen, executive branch officials like the governor have had the ability to grant bonuses since 1969.

Van Fossen is also cautioning his fellow Republicans from overreacting to the report on state worker bonuses and suggests that the committee retrain its focus on the CIETC situation. “Keep the eye on the prize in the sense that CIETC was the bad seed in all of this,” Van Fossen says.

Filed Under: Politics & Government Tagged With: ,
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