Nurses sue San Francisco, demand meal and rest breaks
San Francisco fails to provide nurses at city hospitals with meal and rest breaks or the compensation required by law for missed breaks, three nurses say in a proposed class-action suit seeking damages for their 2,200 colleagues.
State law entitles workers to 30-minute meal breaks after every five hours of work and 10-minute rest breaks after four hours, and to an hour of additional pay for each day that a break is not provided. A law that took effect in January 2023 extended the requirement to government health care agencies, which had previously been exempted.
“The City provides no first meal period or provides a short, late, or interrupted meal period, or a meal period in which (nurses) are not relieved of all duty,” lawyers for the three nurses wrote in a suit filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court. One reason, they said, is the “chronic understaffing” of city hospitals.
As a result, the lawsuit said, nurses at public hospitals “often delay eating, eat while working, or even work an entire shift without being able to sit down or use the bathroom. A nurse may spend her entire shift in a patient’s room while the patient is in labor, or in the operating room while the patient has a C-section.”
Alex Barrett-Shorter, a spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, said the office had not seen the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.
Two plaintiffs work at San Francisco General Hospital and the third is at Laguna Honda Hospital. Susannah Levy, who has been a nurse at S.F. General for 28 years, has had to work 8.5-hour shifts “without being able to eat or use the bathroom once,” and has also been required to work additional overnight shifts after her regular work hours, the suit said.
Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents the nurses, signed a twoyear contract with the city in 2022 requiring meal and rest breaks and payment for missed breaks. But the 2023 state law requires additional break periods and compensation.
Although the law allows health care workers to waive their rights to those added benefits by written agreement, that has not happened in this case, Caitlin Gray, an attorney for the nurses, said.
The suit also said the city had often failed to make even the lesser payments mandated by the union contract.
Another group of nurses, represented by the same law firm, sued the city in federal court in 2020, saying they had been illegally denied overtime pay for weeks in which they worked more than 40 hours.
But U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the suit in 2022, saying the nurses were paid by salary rather than by the hour and therefore were not entitled to overtime. Their appeal is pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.