Nurses and health care workers across the country have gained strength in numbers and labor actions that have not been seen in many years.
In California, which has a strong union tradition, Kaiser Permanente management misjudged workplace tensions during the covid-19 crisis, and when union nurses were unwilling to sign a four-year contract that would cut the wages of new employees, they Faced with the risk of thousands of people going on strike. In Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, nurses have been involved in union struggles over staffing and working conditions.
With the surge in fatal coronavirus cases this year, the daily pressure on the hospital floor is increasing. Some nurses retired; some became traveling nurses, employed by agencies that advertise intensive care unit, telemetry, and emergency room nurses, and their daily rates were double or even triple. Others have given up their jobs to avoid the possibility of bringing the coronavirus home to their families.
Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said: “For nurses, the situation has become particularly severe.”
“They can earn more at McDonald’s”
The situation in Pittsburgh is so severe that registered nurses at West Penn Hospital, a part of the Allegheny Health Network, voted to approve the strike this year-less than a year after they joined with Pennsylvania SEIU Healthcare after. Their main complaint is that the hospital system has been reluctant to increase the staff ratio, even if it offers bonuses, some up to $15,000 to hire registered nurses to fill vacancies.
Kathleen Jae, a member of the negotiating team, reached an agreement without work stoppage. She said that nurses want management to work harder to retain senior staff: “We have to face the fact that nurses are retiring. Leaving the bedside. Frustrated, and in some cases this year, the nurses received more patients than they were comfortable.”
The Allegheny Health Network stated that the first agreement signed with a registered nurse at Sibein University provides “competitive salaries and benefits” to help it “recruit and retain talented and experienced nurses.”
Liz Soriano-Clark, whose negotiating team has turned from a teacher to a nurse, said that the pandemic has made the entire health department more cautious and critical about the work they will do.
“There is a shortage of nursing and nursing instructors across the country. They have seen the assistants leave. They have seen the cleaners leave,” Soriano-Clark said. “Why is this? Because they can earn more at McDonald’s without having to clean up the vomit.”
In September, the American Nurses Association Warns the Biden administration that “our country is facing an unsustainable shortage of nurses” Letter to the Ministry of Health and Human ServicesANA stated that the “crisis-level human resource shortage” is obvious: Mississippi has fewer nurses than 2,000 at the beginning of 2021. Tennessee called on its National Guard to strengthen hospital staff. Texas is hiring 2,500 nurses from outside the state.
In the past 15 years, the number of union members of American nurses has increased and remained stable. About 17%, For five years, according to unionstats.com, An academic website. But 2021 is a year of union organization and held in different workplaces such as Starbucks Coffee Shop and John Deere Tractor Factory, and it is likely to be a turning point for basic workers in the healthcare industry.
“If you ask nurses what they want,” said Given who interviewed dozens of nurses For the 2016 book Regarding health care workers, “They want working conditions that provide a high level of care. They don’t want verbal appreciation. They don’t want marketing. They don’t want shiny new buildings.”
Nonetheless, Givan pointed out that the healthcare sector has spent a lot of money to fight unions.
After years of staff retention issues at Longmont United Hospital in Colorado, nurses are waiting for the results of a vote on whether to join National Nurses United, the largest registered nurse union in the United States.
Stephanie Chrisley, a registered nurse in the hospital’s intensive care unit, says the number of patients that nurses take care of on a regular basis has doubled See fit ——Usually three to four “ventilated, sedated, and critically ill patients”.
In early December, she and others protested outside the hospital. They said that Centura Health, the company that runs the hospital, adopted aggressive union-damaging tactics this year, including protesting a small number of votes, which delayed the union elections for about five months. In another example, her colleague Kris Kloster said that Centura, Founded by a Catholic nun, Issued an email company-wide announcing that everyone except the nurses in her hospital could get a salary increase and retention bonus.
“In places where there should be newly hired nurses, there are anti-union consultants loitering in the hospital,” Chrisley said. She added that since July, the hospital has lost nearly 80 registered nurses, “almost a third of our nursing staff.” Longmont United Hospital interim CEO Kristi Olson said in a statement that the hospital “It will remain open and fully operational” and “we are committed to ensuring that all voices are heard in the union elections.”
Given that the organization may take a long time, he pointed to the tense labor negotiations in Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. “But when there is a crisis-we call it a hot shop-you can get the workers to organize quickly.” The nurses represented by the Massachusetts Association of Nurses left their job in Worcester on March 8. When the management of Tenet Healthcare refused to allow some nurses to return to their original jobs, the opportunity to break the deadlock was shattered. In North Carolina, a registered nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville approved a contract with HCA management that locked in a 17% salary increase over three years and established a committee to review patient care conditions.
A recent poll conducted by the global analysis company Gallup found that 68% of Americans support unions. This is Highest point Since 1965.
Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Medical Workers, said that in the past year, there has been a “proliferation of clues,” and medical workers have asked how to join the union.
Rosselli’s organization represents approximately 15,000 health workers, and he said the pandemic has exposed long-standing practices that have angered employees. He said that too many hospitals are rushing to buy masks, gloves and protective clothing, and front-line staff work around the clock and face terrible deaths every day. “They did not guarantee the safety of employees and patients,” Rosselli said. “It’s all because these systems focus on profit and not anything else. This situation has been going on for a long time.”
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, registered nurses are one of the U.S. occupations that are expected to have the fastest employment growth in the next ten years. 2020-2030 employment forecast. And among them Fastest growing occupation Are practicing nurses, home health assistants and assistants. The shortage of nurses and other health care workers is expected to be most severe in the southern and western regions.
Some of the strongest nursing unions in the United States operate outside of California, representing employees in the western states. Soriano-Clark, who has worked in hospitals in California and Pennsylvania, said: “California nurses have their working hours, the care they have, and the protections they receive through unions.”
Get ready to picket in the pandemic
Doctor assistant Douglas Wong never thought of hoisting a “strike” sign outside the Riverside Medical Center. But this almost happened after negotiations between Kaiser Permanente and the facility’s top nurses union (part of the KP system) broke down. According to KP spokesperson Mark Brown, nurses, pharmacists and operations staff are among the more than 160,000 employees of insurance companies who have joined the union.
The California-based healthcare system giant is trying to enforce a two-tier compensation system, which will reduce the salary of new nurses by 26%. Huang and thousands of allies — many dryly pointed out that they were called “heroes” in the COVID-19 crisis — are ready to picket during the pandemic. When dozens of affiliated unions threatened a one-day sympathy strike, Kaiser Permanente’s demands collapsed.
In some markets, stratified salary demands and attempts to lower wages have been abandoned. The staffing ratio has been adjusted to alleviate safety issues. Wong said that although an agreement was reached, the negotiations between the two parties “feel like a betrayal.”
“There is no doubt: this is a huge victory for the laborers, especially at the two levels of counterattack. At the end of the day, they retreated. We have made tremendous progress in staffing,” said Wong, who is a 6 An employee of KP in 2015 and an official of the California Union Nurses Association/Healthcare Professionals Alliance.
Negotiation is a significant change for Kaiser Permanente. It has relied on labor-management partnerships with unions for most of the past three years, emphasizing cooperative decision-making and intense discussions. There were talks with the team and discussions around the round table to solve the problem. For most of the past decade, KP has been known as a market leader in wages and quality of care, and labor-management partnerships have been viewed by academia and labor experts as an innovative and successful workforce management method.
The health system recently hired new senior managers. To the surprise of the union, Caesars Medical Group negotiated this year to provide a two-tier compensation system, a strategy used by auto and steel manufacturers during the recession in the 1980s. The union negotiator pointed out that the management of this healthcare giant hopes to reduce wages after net income reaches US$6.8 billion from 2018 to 2020.
On Thursday, the workers voted to approve the four-year contract with KP. The company declined to comment for this article. In the press releaseChristian Meisner, Chief Human Resources Officer of KP, said: “This contract reflects our deep gratitude to our employees for their extraordinary commitment and dedication during the pandemic.” “We look forward to working with our labor partners,” he said, “to move forward. Our mission to provide high-quality, affordable care.”
Wall Street Journal recently reported Nurses’ salaries increased by thousands of dollars in 2021 due to competition for workers in hospitals-paid without union quarrels. Premier, a healthcare consulting company hired by The Wall Street Journal, analyzed the salaries of 60,000 registered nurses and found that the average annual salary, excluding overtime or bonuses, increased by about 4% in the first nine months of this year to more than $81,000. According to federal data, this compares to an increase of 2.6% in 2019.
A salary increase does not necessarily mean retention.
“Nurses always seem to be in short supply,” said Professor Paul Clark, the former dean of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at Pennsylvania State University and has studied nursing and labor organizations. “But it is important to realize that there is no shortage of registered nurses. There is a shortage of registered nurses who are willing to work under conditions where they are required to work.”
Spokesperson Lisa Park said in an email that Aya Healthcare, a national travel nurse provider, has discovered that the pandemic has exacerbated the historical understaffing of hospitals. “At the beginning of the pandemic, there were more than 100,000 job vacancies. Now, this number has increased to more than 195,000,” Park said. She added that traveling nurses accounted for less than 2% of the nurses’ labor force, but “as long-term vacancies due to burnout/resignation increase, the demand for temporary medical staff has also increased.”
David Zondeman, a professor of labor history at North Carolina State University, pointed out that in Washington, DC and its hometown, the nurse union has become more politicized and more outspoken. The nurses on the hospital floor have experienced a crisis—worrying about their lives in the absence of protective equipment—just like the experiments conducted by American mining and manufacturing workers in the past few decades.
“It may sound strange,” Zonderman said, “but the nurses are a bit like coal miners. They tend to help each other. They are looking at each other’s back. They are united.”
“And,” he said, “if you treat people badly long enough, they will eventually say,’I’m done.'”
Photo: gpointstudio, Getty Images
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that provides in-depth reports on health issues. KHN, together with Policy Analysis and Polling, is one of the three major operating projects in the United States KFC (Caesar Family Foundation). KFF is a funded non-profit organization that provides information about health issues across the country.
