By Steve Wishnia

“We don’t want pizza parties. We want pay raises so we can stop the hemorrhaging of staff,” Sonia Lawrence, the New York State Nurses Association’s director for New York City Health + Hospitals facilities, told several hundred nurses and supporters gathered in Foley Square May 10.

The overwhelming issue in NYSNA’s current contract talks with the city, the union says, is that the 8,000 nurses it represents at the 11 public hospitals, other NYC Health + Hospitals facilities, and mayoral agencies are paid on average 20-25% less than nurses at private hospitals. Nurses at Health + Hospitals start at about $84,700 a year, according to the union, while those in the private sector average about $104,600, and the gap gets wider as they gain experience.

The result, NYSNA officials and members say, is that nurses hired at city hospitals jump to private hospitals as soon as they have a bit of experience. That has left the city system with about 2,000 vacant positions, which it covers by spending several hundred million dollars a year to hire temporary and traveling nurses through agencies.

“Right now, it’s a revolving door,” Marie Harris, a pediatric emergency-room nurse at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, told Work-Bites. “We give them very expensive training, and then in a year, they go to the private sector.”

“We want comparable wages. If we don’t have comparable wages, we’re not going to recruit nurses,” NYSNA first vice president Dr. Judith Cutchin told Work-Bites before the rally. “We want to save our public health system. We need staffing.”

“We’re working in unsafe conditions,” Harris says. Sometimes there are only three nurses on duty in an emergency department that treats children with trauma injuries, asthma, diabetes, and sickle-cell anemia. Even if it’s not a major emergency, she adds, the lack of staffing delays care, and “parents don’t want to see their child crying.”

The union’s contract with NYC Health + Hospitals expired March 2, with the next negotiating session scheduled for May 15.

“Nurses are the heart of any health system and especially at NYC Health + Hospitals,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to Work-Bites. “Like many other health systems dealing with staff shortages, we rely on contract nurses to temporarily support our dedicated health care teams. The goal is to reduce our dependency on temporary staff, because we know that it’s good for our entire health system. We are grateful for our nurses’ hard work and their commitment to delivering high-quality care to all their patients.”

The solution is simple, Lawrence told the rally. In the first three months of 2022, the city spent $197 million to hire temporary and traveling nurses — more than what it would take to give staff nurses pay parity for a year.

The cost isn’t a problem, city Comptroller Brad Lander said, because “we’re already spending the money that you deserve.”

The overwhelmingly female crowd turned Foley Square into a sea of red, clad in NYSNA-logo T-shirts, caps, sunglasses, and leggings, banging on pans and chanting “Pay Parity!” But when NYSNA executive director Pat Kane asked how many had faced violence or threats on the job, most raised their hands.

“It is maddening that Mayor Eric Adams would deny a fair contract to NYSNA nurses when Health + Hospitals is losing nurses every day,” Dr. Tobias Kirchwey of the Committee of Interns and Residents told the rally. He said that he goes to work in the emergency room at Kings County Hospital “not wondering if we’ll be understaffed — but how understaffed were going to be.”

In the emergency room at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, sometimes there are more travel nurses than staff, said nurse Musu King. The department is supposed to have five nurses on duty, enough to handle two or three critically ill patients each, but there are usually only two or three.

At Harlem Hospital, said nurse Alizia McMyers, there are often only two full-time nurses on a medical surgical floor with 35 to 50 patients, and only two in a critical care unit with 14 patients.

“Is that you?” she asked the crowd.

The constant turnover, Marie Harris says, means that the system is losing valuably experienced nurses without being able to replace them.

“I can see by the way a child is breathing that they’re in respiratory distress,” she says. “I’ve been doing this for so long it’s second nature.”

She learned from working with nurses who had been on the job for more than 30 years, but “you’re not finding that anymore.”

Ten veteran nurses she worked with retired recently, she says. Now, with 12 years at Health + Hospitals, “I’m considered the senior nurse. I stay because I love serving my community.”

“We are the closest New York City comes to universal health care,” Peter Pacheco, a nurse at the Henry J. Carter long-term care facility in East Harlem for more than 20 years and a member of NYSNA’s negotiating committee, told the crowd. Health + Hospitals officials say they understand how the staffing problems are impairing that care, but “they are dragging their feet on pay equity.”

Now that the city is privatizing retirees’ health care, the argument that nurses make less money in the public sector but get better benefits is no longer valid, he continued — and the message that underpaying nurses sends is that the working-class, working-poor, and undocumented patients Health + Hospitals treats are less important.