By Bob Hennelly 

Under the terms of the tentative contract between the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) members will see an 11 percent increase in their pay upon ratification, a significant down payment on what will be a 25 percent boost in pay over the four years term of the deal. More recent hires, who in the past were sacrificed by the union to fund the raises of more senior workers, will see their pay nearly double over the term of the deal.

“We won things nobody thought possible,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “Since the strike began, Ford put 50 percent more on the table than when we walked out. This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford, at the Big Three, and across the auto industry. Together, we are turning the tide for the working class in this country.”

According to the UAW, the gains in the proposed contract are “valued at more than four times the gains from the 2019 contract and provide more in base wage increases than Ford workers have received in the past 22 years.”

Throughout the strike, the UAW reasoned that its members, who made major concessions during the Great Recession, should now be made whole because of the auto industry’s rebound into profitability that had sent CEO pay into the stratosphere.

“This is a major victory for the union after years of erosion by inflation, division by wage tiers and other real issues in the workplace that made people angry,” Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times. “It sets a standard for other workers throughout the economy.”

As it turns out, going into the strike, the UAW, which was initially looking for a four-day work week, a 45 percent raise and the end of tiered wages, had a not so secret weapon, the enthusiastic support of 75 percent of the American public, according to the Gallup Poll.

It also had the enthusiastic support of the current occupant of the White House, President Joe Biden, who took the unprecedented step of joining UAW strikers on their picket line.

“I’ve always believed the middle class built America and unions built the middle class,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House after the Ford UAW announcement. “That is especially the case for UAW workers who built an iconic American industry. And critical to building an economy from the middle out and bottom up, instead of from the top down, is worker power.”

Biden’s enthusiastic embrace of the UAW strikers stands in stark contrast to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s MIA status when it comes to the 1,700 nurses with the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 who have been on strike for safer staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick since Aug. 4.

Not only has Murphy not shown up at the nurses’ New Brunswick picket line, but his public messaging on the dispute has been reminiscent of a bowl of overcooked pasta. To add insult to his detachment, his longtime Chief of Staff George Helmy left his public post in the middle of the lengthy strike to become a vice-president at the hospital’s parent Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas which is spending a fortune trying to discredit the union.

Earlier this month tens of thousands of healthcare workers with Kaiser Permanente in several state and Washington D.C. went on a three-day strike for higher wages and safer staffing. Thanks to the around the clock direct engagement of  acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su a landmark deal was struck. It boosted pay 21 percent over the length of the contract and also promoted staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU).

Two emails to Murphy’s press office asking if the governor would ask Su to intervene in the USW Nurses Local 4-200 strike, that’s now over three months old, got no response from a press office that historically has been very conscientious about responding.

Judy Danella, RN, and president of USW Local 4-200 says the lack of support from many members of the Democratic Party establishment including Murphy  has been an eye opener.

“It’s just not what other states have had like California and New York in terms of support for labor,” Danella told Work-Bites. “In New York, they had Attorney General Letitia James and it’s not like what the UAW has had [in the way of political support]. Here, it’s very minimal. I went to a New York State Nurses Association convention and Letitia James was speaking there on Monday and she said I will walk every picket line with every nurse in the state. That was just so uplifting to hear.”

Danella said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), whose district includes the Middlesex County hospital, has “given support” and several weeks back Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) dropped by the picket line as did Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin.

The embattled and twice indicted Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) wrote a letter of support for the nurses’ union early on.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who has announced he’s running for Menendez’s seat, said in a statement that it was “frustrating that this stalemate has gone on so long.”

“Our nurses and healthcare workers at RWJ and hospitals around New Jersey and across our nation are there for us when we need them the most,” Kim wrote.  “We should be there for them when it comes to safe staffing standards, fair wages, and good benefits. Nurses aren’t asking for the moon.”

“I have reached out to the hospital to talk and let it be known my views on this which is that I support our nurses,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told this reporter a few weeks into the strike.  “We have got to get them a contract that makes sense amidst a nursing crisis not just in our state but around the country. We hailed them as heroes during the pandemic but when it comes to their compensation, the nursing ratios we’ve got to make sure they are being treated like heroes not just in words but in the kind of contract and living circumstances they have.”

Booker continued, “I have been concerned for a long time. Again, the pandemic revealed a lot of challenges from our nursing homes to our hospitals – a lot of the crises we have with supporting the kind of workforce [we need]. It’s just not about them. It’s also about patient [care] quality. It’s patient safety and more…. that’s why it was important for me to come forward quickly and support the nurses.”

Ironically, the New Jersey’s nurses most vigorous champion is from outside the state, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Sanders is actually convening an unusual field hearing on Oct. 27 in New Brunswick which will explore how multi-billion dollar non-profits like RWJBarnabas payout Wall Street-size salaries while not maintaining sufficient staffing nor providing sufficient charity care.

A report released by Sanders Committee staff concluded “that many nonprofit hospital systems across the country are failing to provide low-income Americans with the affordable medical care required by their nonprofit status – despite receiving billions in tax benefits and providing exorbitant compensation packages to their senior executives,” according to the press release announcing the study.

“In 2020, nonprofit hospitals received $28 billion in tax breaks for the purpose of providing affordable health care for low-income Americans,” said Sanders. “And yet, despite these massive tax breaks, most nonprofit hospitals are actually reducing the amount of charity care they provide to low-income families even as CEO pay is soaring. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

Sanders continued, “At a time when 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, over 500,000 people go bankrupt because of medically related debt, and over 60,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford to go to a doctor when they need to, nonprofit hospitals should be providing more charity care to those who desperately need it, not less. And if they refuse to do so, they should lose their tax-exempt status.”

Danella thinks the reluctance of Murphy and other Democrats to be as supportive as Sanders is because “they are too close to the RWJBarnabas system” which has a lot of money to spread around.

The  RWJBarnabas system is a not-for-profit healthcare giant with a dozen acute care hospitals and a partnership with Rutgers University. The system has 38,000 employees and $6.6 billion in revenue. It relies on hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-exempt state-issued bonds for capital construction.

The system's recently-retired CEO and President Barry Ostrowsky earned $16 million in the second year of the pandemic, making him the highest-paid hospital executive in the New York area, according to Crain's New York .

For its public relations strategy, management is relying on MWW [MikeWorldWide], the powerhouse firm founded by Michael Kempner, described by Politico as a "major Democratic fundraiser who bundled millions of dollars for Barack Obama's campaigns."  

According to Kempner's LinkedIn profile, he is "active in progressive politics, having played roles in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most recently, Joe Biden."

Last month, a judge restricted the union's picketing at the New Brunswick facility, which is also the construction site of a billion-dollar expansion of a cancer center that bears the name of Jack Morris, a Democratic donor and philanthropist, who also chairs the RWJ University Hospital board of directors.

According to the Sander’s committee’s analysis, RWJBarnabas and the other 15 non-profit hospital chains saw “a steady increase in their revenues and operating profits” while spending “less on charity care than they received in tax benefits between 2011 and 2018.”

The report continued. “While these hospitals provide woefully insufficient care to the patients most in need, they provide massive salaries to their top executives. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available for all of the 16 hospital chains, those companies’ CEOs averaged more than $8 million in compensation and collectively made over $140 million.”

Senate researchers found that “New York Presbyterian Hospital paid its CEO $10.9 million in 2021 while providing just $68.5 million in charity care — an amount that is just 0.7 percent of the hospital system’s nearly $10 billion in revenue” while  “New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health system paid its CEO more than 18 percent of what it spent on charity care in 2021.”

Incredibly, according to the report’s analysis, federal law does not prescribe a floor regarding the amount of financial assistance a non-profit hospital must provide to low-income patients, or “even the amount of community benefit, including charity care, a non-profit hospital has to provide to keep its non-profit status.” 

As a consequence, “the disparities between the paltry amounts these hospitals are spending on charity care and their massive revenues and excessive executive compensation demonstrates that they are failing to live up to their end of the non-profit bargain,” according to the report.

Evidently, it’s only nurses unions like USW Nurses Local 4-200 who are up to the task of holding these self-dealing systems like Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas accountable.