By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we are joined by Pete Kramer, veteran reporter with the Journal News and member of the News Guild CWA New York State team to discuss today’s one-day strike against Gannett called at two dozen newspapers in several states. Month after month Gannett has refused to bargain in good faith. Meanwhile, it laid off 600 local reporters to try and redeem a failed Wall Street strategy at the over-leveraged media giant that paid its CEO Mike Reed $7.74 million in 2021 — 160 times the median salary of the company’s workforce.

Kramer makes the case that authenticated local news reporting is essential for the survival of our democracy that is undermined by aggregated social media that’s increasingly being passed off as journalism based content. Since 2004, according to the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism, the United State has lost 1,800 newspapers leaving huge swaths of the nation veritable news deserts.

In the second half of the show, we talk to NYSNA’s Kristle Simms-Murphy RN, FPN who updates us on her union’s battle to win pay equity for the 8,000 nursing professionals that staff New York City’s 11 safety net Health + Hospitals Corporation hospitals, which take ALL patients regardless of their insurance or immigration status. H+HC nurses make 20-percent less than their counterparts at New York City’s private, non-profit hospitals.

Gaps in staffing result in poorer patient outcomes, increased incidence of workplace injury as well undermining nurse retention.

Simms-Murphy describes the essential role played by her nursing colleagues throughout multiple city agencies including Rikers Island where the ratio between inmate patients to nurses is an unacceptable 25 to 1.

Currently, the city is missing 25-percent of the nurses it requires, and so it backfills thousands and thousands of shifts with so-called “traveling nurses” that have cost the city several hundred million dollars a year to hire. 

Listen to the entire show below: