DuranRochelle Duran
Kaiser Fremont Medical Center

I live in Fremont and am a security officer at Kaiser Fremont Medical Center. I have been a security officer at Kaiser for about 3 yrs. I work for Inter-Con Security Services, the company that Kaiser hires to provide security.

It’s hard to provide security at a hospital. We get patients who are violent. I’ve been kicked, hit, grabbed, and spit on – and we don’t get training to deal with these patients.

Now I have a 6 month old baby boy. But when I was pregnant, my doctor suggested I needed a new position at work. He said, “We don’t want to put you and your child at risk” because it can be so dangerous to work security at a hospital.

I brought the note from my doctor to my boss at Inter-Con to see if I could work a different post for a while. At first, they gave me a position in the control room so I wouldn’t have to deal with the psych patients who are sometimes violent. But then they cut my pay $6.50 per hour. That was really hard for me as I was getting ready to have my baby.

While I was pregnant, there were days that I was sick and didn’t feel well enough to come to work. But we don’t have any sick days. Overall, I probably missed about 2 weeks pay because I was sick. That was hard. There’s no way I could have made it without help from my family.

We work in a hospital. We’re going to get sick. It doesn’t make sense to me that we don’t have sick days. Everyone else who works here gets paid sick days. We should be able to earn sick days too.

But later things got much worse for me. Inter-Con told me that they didn’t have a position for me at all. They said that they didn’t have positions for pregnant women. They also said that if they helped me, they’d have to do it for all officers who get pregnant. So I had to go on disability because they wouldn’t let me work there.

Read Rochelle’s blog posting at the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rochelle-duran/emjust-workem-striking-fo_b_95071.html