Striking nurses from the Kuakini Medical Center sign in at the union hall to begin voting on the ratification of a new labor agreement. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

The tentative agreement was reached Tuesday.

"People are happy we came to a tentative agreement that we will probably ratify because it addressed all our main points," said Kuakini nurse Kerry Lineham.

Sue Scheider, collective bargaining director for the Hawai'i Nurses' Association, said the results of the vote will be announced about 7 p.m. today. She was confident the contract will be ratified.

"This is a good contract," she said. "Why wouldn't they vote for it and come off the streets?"

A ratification vote would end one of three labor disputes between nurses and hospital management. Nurses from The Queen's Medical Center will review a tentative agreement this weekend, but no ratification vote date has been scheduled.

No talks are in the works, though, for nurses on strike at St. Francis Medical Center.

Kuakini nurses will need to attend one of two computer orientation sessions Wednesday and Thursday before they can be scheduled for work, Lineham said.

A "return to work" agreement for Kuakini nurses took surprisingly long ­ 21 hours, Scheider said.

One sticking point involved who would return to work first, she said.

Because patient levels dropped during the strike, not every nurse is needed, but the senior nurses wanted to make sure the junior nurses would not go without a paycheck, Scheider said. The nurses will job-share until patient numbers rise, she said.

"These nurses have such big hearts," she said. "They wanted to make sure the junior nurses were not left out in the cold."

Kuakini administrators told the nurses union during the return-to-work agreement talks that it wanted to consolodate units in the hospital but Scheider said that could not happen without further negotiations.

The Kuakini tentative contract agreement, reached at 3 a.m. Tuesday, addressed the issues of mandatory overtime and health insurance for retirees.

Nurses also would receive a 20 percent pay increase over three years: 7 percent the first year; 6.25 percent the second and 6.75 percent the third.

Pay at Kuakini ranges from $20.55 to $34.84 an hour for the most experienced nurses, so the proposed increase would take that pay to a range of $24.66 to $41.81 an hour, or between $42,744 and $86,965 a year before overtime.