NEWS SUMMARY ________________________________
The negotiations between striking nurses and administrators at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick ended on Friday without a deal. The talks are scheduled to resume on Tuesday. The nurses’ demands include mandatory minimum staffing ratios, pay raises, a freeze on insurance premiums, and protections for calling out sick. Administrators have committed to staffing minimums conceptually but have not agreed to provisions that would require them to be enforced. The hospital has repeatedly insisted that it has some of the best staffing ratios statewide.
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by Dana DiFilippo, New Jersey Monitor
October 6, 2023
Negotiations between striking nurses and administrators at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick ended Friday without a deal, but talks are scheduled to resume Tuesday.
“We did not make progress toward a settlement today, but we gave management a proposal that we believe addresses any reasonable concerns they have raised,” said Judy Danella, president of United Steelworkers Local 4-200, which represents the nurses. “The ball is now in their court.”
About 1,700 nurses walked off the job on Aug. 4 after administrators refused their demands for mandatory minimum staffing ratios that would require the hospital to schedule one nurse for every one to five patients, depending on the patient’s need.
Friday, union leaders told the New Jersey Monitor that remains both the nurses’ goal and a sticking point.
“We still want safe staffing, and that’s exactly what we’re on strike for. We want a contract today. We want to settle this and be done. We want to take good care of our patients,” said Renee Bacany, the union’s chief shop steward. “But we need to do that with safe staffing.”
Administrators have committed to staffing minimums conceptually but have not agreed to provisions that would require them to be enforced, union leaders said. The nurses also want pay raises, a freeze on insurance premiums, and protections for calling out sick.
Administrators have repeatedly insisted the hospital has some of the best staffing ratios statewide, and they said it again Friday.
“Staffing at RWJUH is not just proper, but among the highest in New Jersey,” spokeswoman Wendy Gottsegen said in a statement. “In fact, the hospital is staffed by 170 more nurses than is called for in the recently proposed staffing legislation in Trenton that the union claims to support. Further, in many cases RWJUH’s staffing proposal meets or exceeds levels set forth by legislation in states like California and in a number of hospital labor settlements across the country.”
But Bacany, a registered nurse who has worked at the hospital since 2006, accused administrators of putting out “false information and downright lies.” Shifts are so routinely understaffed that nurses filed 400 complaints called “unsafe staffing protests” with supervisors in the past year, she added.
‘An astronomical cost’
With the strike poised to enter its 65th day Saturday, the hospital has spent a fortune on replacement nurses — $76.2 million as of Sept. 29, according to public letter signed by hospital President Alan Lee.
“That’s an astronomical cost,” Bacany said. “When you step back and think about it, they could have fixed this staffing for a lot less money than $76 million.”
Replacement nurses who have worked at the hospital during the strike are making, on average, $4,405 a week — twice the national average of $2,153 weekly, according to John Kuo, founder of HealthJob. New Jersey was the highest-paying state for so-called “travel nurses” last month, Kuo said. Cities and states that pay the most for travel nurses typically are places with chronic nursing shortages, he added.
Yet hospital administrators are shooing new nurses out the door to the picket line — and possibly to other employers, Bacany said. New nurses spend their first 90 days on the job on probation before they become union members, and administrators have ousted about 50 new nurses who crossed that 90-day threshold since the strike’s start, Bacany said.
“These are nurses that should be working at the bedside. They’ve worked there for 90 days. But now they’re telling them: ‘You’re union, you need to get out,’” she said.
Relations have grown increasingly bitter, with hospital administrators last month ending striking nurses’ health insurance and asking a judge to restrict picketing outside the hospital. Nurses protested Thursday at a board meeting at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, because RWJBarnabas Health CEO Mark Manigan is a board member.
A federal mediator is overseeing negotiations, but talks so far have been infrequent, with Friday’s six-hour meeting the first in three weeks.
Hospital administrators seem just as committed to standing firm against nurses’ demands as the nurses are to staffing ratios. Friday, Gottsegen called the union’s demands “untenable outlier positions” and urged union leaders and the nurses to allow an independent arbitrator to issue a binding decision on new contract terms.
“The strike that USW 4-200 has chosen to engage in has lasted nine weeks because the union wants more than any health care organization would ever agree to,” Gottsegen said.
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