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By Bob Hennelly

Gov. Phil Murphy's appointment of George Helmy, his former chief of staff who left his job to work for RWJ Barnabas Health in the midst of a bitter nurses strike over staffing, is a graphic example of the insular and self-dealing nature of our state’s politics.

During the long strike key elements of the New Jersey Democratic Party sat on the sidelines  as the hospital system was trying to break the union by spending well over $150 million on replacement nurses. There were leaders like Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th CD) who came to the aid of the nurses but he was a notable exception. 

Ultimately, it wouldn’t be until after Christmas that Local 4-200 went back to work with a new contract that made significant progress on the staffing issue. The nurses who went out on behalf of better patient care benefited from a change in the law thanks to the NJ AFL-CIO that extended unemployment to striking workers like the nurses. It was still a real hardship for the 1,700 men and women who were willing to take on one of the most politically powerful entities in the state whose advertising dominates broadcast, cable and news media websites.

For the striking United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick Helmy’s move was demoralizing at a time when they were looking for support from a Democratic Governor who stayed on the sidelines. It felt to the nurses like the former Goldman Sachs  executive’s real affinity was with the over compensated hospital executives like the former CEO of RWJ Barnabas who made $16 million in the second year of the pandemic.  

Unlike President Biden, who joined the UAW on the picket line, Murphy largely left the nurses on their own to battle the nominally “non-profit”  hospital and he countenanced the very public decision by his top advisor to go to offer aid and comfort to the same hospital that cut off the striking nurses healthcare who had gotten the institution through the mass death event that was COVID.

In a less corrupt state there would have been at least an ethics probe about when Helmy got the offer to jump ship. It would have been good to know if, as he was having confidential conversations with Local 4-200 leadership about the strike as the Governor’s chief of staff, he knew he had the hospital system's six figure offer in his back pocket. 

All he got was a pat on the back from the professional political class who love to see one of their own cash in big on their public service.  

Local 4-200 went on strike for safer staffing, not just for their sake but for the patients and their families. Since 2004, when California adopted such standards, multiple peer reviewed studies documented better patient outcomes, a reduction in readmissions, improved infection control, fewer workplace injuries and improved nurse retention. 

In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million Americans, as well as thousands of healthcare workers, who died as a consequence of their workplace exposure to the virus, health care unions have flagged the lack of sufficient PPE and staffing as helping to  undermine infection control during the once in a century mass death event.

Last year,  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee (HELP) convened a field hearing in New Brunswick captioned, “Overworked and Undervalued: Is the Severe Hospital Staffing Crisis Endangering the Well-Being of Patients and Nurses?”

The Sander’s HELP Committee released a report in preparation for the field hearing documenting that nonprofit hospital systems like RWJBarnabas failed “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.”

“In 2020, nonprofit hospitals received $28 billion in tax breaks for the purpose of providing affordable health care for low-income Americans,” Sanders observed in a press release issued with the report. “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.” 

At the New Brunswick hearing Sanders observed the U.S. was spending “almost as much per capita as any other major country. We are spending $13,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. We should have the best healthcare  system in the world. We are far behind many, many countries. Despite our large expenditure, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured.”

Addressing his audience directly, the Vermont senator said, “You deal with these folks every day and it’s not talked about at all but some 60,000 Americans die every single year because they don’t get the medical help they need it — you’ve seen it. They are sick and the doctors and nurses ask: ‘Why didn’t you come in six months ago when you had your symptoms?’ And the answer was, ‘I wasn’t insured or couldn’t afford the deductible.”

The other issue that is not discussed is U.S. life expectancy, Sanders added. “How long we live is much lower than other countries, and is actually in decline,” he said. “And for working class people, lower income people, the gap in their life expectancy with the rich is about ten years in America — that is unacceptable.” 

Nurse retention is  also a key issue because in the current economy we have over one million nurses that are sitting on the sidelines because post-pandemic they don’t want to practice at the hospital bedside if it is in a setting where profits are always put ahead of patient and staff well-being. There can be nothing more stressful than being a nurse and  your hospital system punishes you for doing what your training tells you is the right thing  by your patient. 

The moral injury that results from being forced to put money over humanity day in and day out is soul killing. The strike was being closely watched by the rest of the state’s hospitals and the other nurses’ unions that are pressing Trenton to adopt the nurse to patient staffing ratios enacted by California in 2004.

Debbie White, RN, is president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest nurses’ union.   

“HPAE continues to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters of the USW nurses at RWJB who have had the courage to go on strike for safe staffing,” White wrote in a statement. “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.”

Carol Tanzi, RN, has been working at RWJ University Hospital for 26 years and is the USW Nurses Local 4-200 chief shop steward. She’s deeply troubled by  Murphy’s decision to pick Helmy for filling out the unexpired term of Senator Bob Menendez, who was convicted on multiple corruption charges.

“It’s almost like he [Gov. Murphy] is working against working people—it’s like another ‘no’ vote for working people—it’s like just another way of telling working people  we don’t care about you we only care about elites—that’s all that matters in this state,” Tanzi told said. Tanzi said the  failure of Governor Murphy, along with Helmy’s defection RWJ  Barnabas “was calculated to put their foot on the neck of nurses. Our politics are too often about personal favors that increase personal fortunes. I never want to be part of that club. I want to dismantle it.”

Larry Hamm, long time Essex County based social justice and peace activist ran in the recently completed Democratic primary. In that contest  Rep. Andy Kim garnered 74 percent of the vote, with Patricia Campos Medina, a labor educator and activist, receiving 16 percent and Hamm receiving more than nine percent, or 47,796 votes. Hamm sees the appointment of Helmy as a major missed opportunity to advance diversity and rehabilitate New Jersey's reputation as systemically corrupt.

“It was disappointing to see Gov. Murphy squander the opportunity of advancing the progressive and  labor movements by not appointing myself or Patricia Campos Medina, who were candidates in the state’s primary election, to the unexpired US Senate term,” Hamm said. “By appointing George Helmy, his former Chief of Staff who got a gold plated job at Robert Wood Johnson, while that hospital system tried to break the nurses’ union when on strike, Murphy is reminding union folks how little he did to help the nurses when they really needed it.”  

Adding insult to injury was the way that the New York Times reported on Helmy’s elevation without any reference to what was going on at the time of his jumping ship and coming on board RWJ Barnabas. 

In a Times story headlined “Menendez Will Be replaced in Senate by Murphy Loyalist” the paper of record goes into great detail about Mr. Helmy’s potential pension payout from the combination of his years serving as an aide to Senator Cory Booker and former Senator Frank Lautenberg as well as the remainder of Sen. Menendez unexpired term.

Missing was any mention of the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 strike that went on from August through the winter holiday season. It was almost like these essential workers had gone back to being invisible to the New York Times, George Helmy and Gov. Murphy.