Pearl River One recent report noted that despite all of the talk, blue collar jobs in construction and elsewhere continue to go wanting, while service sector jobs, especially in healthcare are propping up the entire US economy. A report in the Wall Street Journal took this another step forward making the case that if young people wanted to find a family-supporting job that would put them into the homeowning, solid citizen middle class, they needed to look at nursing. The average registered nurse in the US was making $93,000 per year, and nurse practitioners were making over $130,000 annually. These new age Florence Nightingales are making serious bank now for sure!
No small reason is that their unions are also leading the way, both in growth and their willingness to hit the streets and the increasingly consolidated and monopolizing hospitals to make sure they get paid. There are a lot of bumps in the road in some parts of the country. The National Nurses United won an election in a New Orleans hospital and after almost three years and a half-dozen small strikes are still struggling to get a contract. On the other hand, more recently, nurses with the New York State Nurses Association, about 15,000 of them struck three of the largest hospital chains in New York City capturing headlines for weeks.
Recently, I talked to one of the strikers and nurse activists, Julia Donahue, a nurse practitioner, who I’ve known in one way or another over the last several decades, since I first met her as a friend of my daughter’s at a Chinese restaurant, when she was an intern for a union in Buenos Aires, and my daughter was an ACORN organizer there. I wanted to get a better idea of both what the strike was like from the inside, as well as the union’s demands and final settlements. Julia works at a clinic that is part of the Montefiore system. Mount Sinai and Presbyterian were the other two chains that were part of this strike. These three NYSNA contracts were timed to expire at the same time, but obviously the outcome would have a ripple effect throughout the industry, both there and nationally.
Julia said the strike was well organized and supported. The union had a communication system that kept nurses on the line and elsewhere up to date on bargaining. The issues were both the same and different within the three hospitals. In Montefiore, one of the big complaints was that patients were packed into the hallways, because of a shortage of rooms. Patient violence to nurses was also an issue, something that the HBO award winning show “The Pitt” has vividly portrayed. Patient care ratios were also a key issue, as they always are in these strikes. Nurses want to give patients full treatment, but exploding numbers of patients force the standards to be “good enough,” rather than “best practices” that come from their training and experience. For sure, money was also an issue, given the high costs of living and working in New York City.
Having lived through a nurses’ strike in recent years, the hospitals were more prepared and dug in for this strike with scabs at the ready. Nurses expected to be back to work within a couple of weeks. Early in the strike, Julia was pretty confident that it would be over within three weeks, but the dispute wasn’t settled until they had been out almost six weeks. At one point, Julia was one of more than a dozen nurses from the three hospitals, and the only nurse practitioner, who were arrested in civil disobedience at the offices of the hospital association.
Nurses won quite a bit, though not everything. Montefiore did commit to repurposing some teaching areas into more bed space. Less progress was made on staffing ratios and nurse protection, but that fight isn’t over. There had been reports that the nurses were demanding $200,000 per year. Julia laughed at that, but they did win increases of 4% each year over a three-year contract, which would have bested inflation projections at the time of the settlements in February, before Trump’s war in Iran changed everyone’s calculations.
Union members and activists like Julia and nurses in general might be all of our best hope for a new kind of leadership and success in reinvigorating the labor movement. Almost anyone who has ever been forced to be in a hospital, would be in favor of nurses being treated well and paid fairly. Given the attacks on healthcare and the soaring costs, we may need nurses and other organized healthcare workers to win battles for all of us, as they have proven they can do for themselves.