By Bob Hennelly

While most all of the nation is at home enjoying the warmth of Thanksgiving with their families, members of United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 will be out on the picket line in front of the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey on strike for safer staffing as they have been since Aug. 4.

These 1,700 dedicated healthcare professionals have been stripped of their healthcare coverage by RWJBarnabas, which is self-insured. The multi-billion dollar “non-profit” hospital chain paid its CEO $17 million in the second year of the COVID pandemic, and has shelled out well over $100 million to pay replacement nurses in their full court press to break the union, according to the union.

Across the country this year, in the aftermath of COVID, when thousands and thousands of essential workers died from their workplace exposure to COVID, 450,000 union workers were willing to resort to a strike, a 900 percent increase from just two years ago.

“I am grateful that 1,700 people were willing to stand up for what’s right even though it was such a sacrifice because it was so scary but people were brave enough to realize how important this is,” Carol Tanzi, RN, a member of USW Local 4-200, told Work-Bites. “This is such a broken [healthcare] system and hopefully, this is shining a light on that and we will have some impact on that too.”

Tanzi continued, “Now, we are going community to community and going to Town Hall meetings — getting the public more engaged and we have also started a coalition between the larger community and nurses from other hospitals to get involved. Little by little we are growing this movement. The only way you can’t grasp just how sick the healthcare system is right now is if you don’t have any skin in the game or are making money off  keeping it the way it is.”

Debbie White, RN, is president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest nurses’ union which is leading a statewide campaign to get New Jersey to adopt mandatory nurse to patient staffing ratios, as was done in California in 2004.

“HPAE continues to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of the USW nurses at RWJB who have had the courage to strike for safe staffing,” White wrote Work-Bites. “We are thankful for these brave nurses, and we applaud their resolve as they highlight an issue that will affect every patient in every hospital. We know that smaller nurse to patient assignments equate to better care, safer workplaces, and better outcomes for patients.”

The Local 4-200 nurses are part of a growing movement of workers in this country willing to put something at risk to not only improve their own circumstances and that of their families, but of all workers and their families. As we saw with the recent United Auto Workers [UAW] contract settlement, that union’s 25 percent pay boost manifested almost overnight in a bump up of the wages being paid by non-union automakers like Honda and Toyota.

The union revival is long overdue.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently observed that “over the last 50 years, despite huge increases in technology and worker productivity” American workers are  “making about $50 a week less than he or she did fifty years ago.”

Sanders, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, estimates that 60 percent of Americans struggle, often with two incomes in a household, to make ends meet because their wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living.

“Tens of millions of Americans are struggling to put food on their table and pay their rent, while the wealthiest people in this country are doing better than they ever have in the history of America” with “more wealth inequality than at any time since the Gilded Age,” Sanders said at a recent Senate hearing. “Today, three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 165 million Americans.”

Yet, for the striking RWJUH nurses, their strike is actually more about improving the medical outcomes for their patients and the viability of their profession itself. In the years since California enacted mandatory nurse to patient ratios in 2004, peer reviewed studies have documented improved patient outcomes, a reduction in the incidence of patient re-admittance to the hospital, and a drop in workplace injuries, as well as a gain in nurse retention — a major national challenge. 

“In April 2022, Dr. David Auerbach and colleagues published a nursing workforce analysis in Health Affairs, which found that total supply of RNs decreased by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021 – the largest drop than ever observed over the past four decades,” according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. “A significant number of nurses leaving the workforce were under the age of 35, and most were employed in hospitals.”

A  joint Guardian newspaper and Kaiser Health News investigation concluded that 3,600 nurses died in the first wave of the pandemic, 700 of them from New York and New Jersey with two thirds of them people of color. Throughout the country, healthcare professionals were forced to improvise personnel protective equipment which was in short supply while inadequate hospital and nursing home staffing undermined infection control helping to drive up the death toll.

Today, as hospitals scramble to find nurses, over one million nurses are opting to stay sidelined with just half of New Jersey’s 140,000 licensed nurses choosing to work in the state’s hospitals.

Earlier this year, tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser Permanente in several states won a 21-percent pay increase over four years following a three-day strike in October, the largest such action in U.S. history. The deal included restrictions on outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

“Millions of Americans are safer today because tens of thousands of dedicated healthcare workers fought for and won the critical resources they need and that patients need,” Caroline Lucas, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, said in a statement. “This historic agreement will set a higher standard for the healthcare industry nationwide.”

The United States has the world’s most expensive health care system with the poorest health outcomes — and we have the rapidly declining life expectancy to prove it. We are only 4 percent of the earth’s population. But we had the highest COVID death toll with over 1.1 million lives lost out of the almost 7 million that perished worldwide.

In essence, it’s the nation’s healthcare unions like the New York State Nurses Association, which has also resorted to striking as required, that are holding the American for-profit healthcare system accountable for its performance during COVID.

Lord knows, no one else is…and for that we should all be grateful.

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