Listen: Battling Nurses Win; Building Cleaners Play Hardball; Labor Leads on Gaza Ceasefire
Members of the Amazon Labor Union join a large labor contingent in Herald Square this past weekend to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Photo by Joe Maniscalco
By Bob Hennelly
Late last week, United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 voted overwhelmingly to ratify their contract with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and should be back to work in the first week of January after a bitter four month strike for safer staffing.
Under the terms of the 3-year deal, the hospital will face monetary penalties paid in the form of premium pay to nurses when management fails to meet the staffing standards. It’s important to note that Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas, the hospital’s parent non-profit, has spent $130 million on strike breaking nurses since August. Local 4-200 President Judy Donella provides an update.
Judy is joined by Manny Pastreich, the president of 32 BJ SEIU, the country’s largest building service union that represents New York City’s 20,000 commercial-building cleaners who will vote on Wednesday on whether to authorize a strike.
Steve Wishnia, my Work-Bites colleague, reported last week the Realty Advisory Board [RAB], the trade group that handles the landlords’ negotiations with the union, gave 32BJ a contract proposal that demanded several major givebacks. They included having workers’ pay part of their health-care premiums; a two-tier system in which people hired in the future would get lower wages and benefits; and, in the name of “flexibility,” work-rule changes such as reducing sick days, vacation, and overtime pay, and increasing the area workers are required to clean.
32 BJ also has major contract fights in New Jersey and Connecticut.
In the second half of the show, we speak with Daniel Vincente, director for Region 9 UAW and a member of the union's national executive board which voted on Friday to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
As my Work-Bites colleague Joe Maniscalco reported in Work-Bites over the weekend, the very same day of the UAW action, 1199 SEIU, the nation’s largest healthcare union, with more than 450,000 members, also voted for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as well as an unconditional release of all the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7. We will talk with Dan about organized labor’s historic role acting as the conscience for the nation.
Listen to the entire show below: