By Steve Wishnia

Some 1,800 workers at two branches of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York State will go on strike for 17 hours on December 13, after little progress in more than three months of contract talks.

The main sticking point, 1199SEIU lead negotiator Tracey Harrison told Work-Bites, is that URMC management has so far refused to raise the starting wage at the lowest pay grade, now $15.45 an hour. Management is “not interested in paying a living wage,” he says.

The union cites the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator, which estimates that a living wage for a family of three in the Rochester area would be $19.16 an hour — if both adults are working full-time.

Members of 1199SEIU, which represents about 1,500 caregivers and patient-service workers at URMC’s Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, and SEIU Local 200, with 300 to 400 food and service workers at the University of Rochester’s River Campus, voted almost unanimously on November 21 to authorize a strike. The two unions’ contracts expired October 31.

“The members are tired of the little pennies were working for,” says Axel Colon, a stock keeper who has worked at River Campus for 22 years.

URMC is the largest part of the University of Rochester, the largest private-sector employer in upstate New York. The medical network has more than 26,000 workers. It operates six hospitals, with the 886-bed Strong Memorial Hospital its flagship, and also owns nine urgent-care centers and “an extensive primary care network” in Western New York.

“The University of Rochester has been negotiating in good faith since late August with union representatives from 1199SEIU and 200United SEIU for a multiyear contract renewal that is competitive, fair, and equitable. Despite our extensive efforts, SEIU submitted an intent to strike notice on Thursday, Nov. 30,” the university said in a statement. “Contingency plans are in place that will ensure that all University operations and activities, including patient care at the Medical Center, will continue without disruption. University officials are confident that in the event of a prolonged strike, campus operations will continue as normal without interruption, however they are always willing and prepared to meet at the bargaining table to continue to negotiate a fair and equitable contract.”

Housing-cost burden

Hospital workers say their pay isn’t anywhere near enough to cover Rochester’s escalating housing costs.

“I make $19.95 an hour, and it’s hard for me to pay my mortgage,” says April Shepherd, a patient-care technician who has worked at URMC for 20 years. A single mother with three children, she had to take a second job recently when a tax increase raised her monthly payments by almost 25%, to more than $1,350, she says.

“For me to make ends meet, I have to ask for extra hours,” says Colon, a first-time homeowner. The day before he spoke to Work-Bites, he worked from 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.

In 2022, Realtor.com estimated that rents in Rochester, a city of 210,000 people, had risen by more than 11% over the previous year. In 2021, it said they’d gone up by almost 8%, the tenth-highest increase among U.S. cities. Rochester considered enacting rent stabilization after a 2019 state law allowed upstate cities to do so, but a city-contracted survey in 2021 found that the vacancy rate was above the 5% needed to qualify. Housing activists criticized the survey because less than 40% of the landlords of the 10,000 apartments that would have been covered responded.

1199SEIU has been one of the main unions calling for stronger rent regulations statewide, both in 2019 and last year, when it backed an unsuccessful attempt to pass a state law to ban evictions without a specific “good cause.”

Like many other health-care workers, URMC staff complain about understaffing. April Shepherd, who works in Golisano Children’s Hospital — part of the Strong Memorial complex — says she now has to care for 24 patients at a time, when she used to have six.

It now takes almost two hours, she adds, to check all their vital signs, such as temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Her other duties include drawing blood, giving patients bed baths, administering electrocardiograms, dressing wounds, and spending one-on-one time with suicidal teenagers.

“I’m Elastic Girl,” she says. “I have to be stretched all over the place.”

The majority of departments are short-staffed, says Tracey Harrison, which makes it an “extreme challenge” to recruit and retain workers.

“We have to jump from building to building because we can’t get enough people,” says Colon, a Local 200 member who distributes cleaning supplies and soap dispensers from what he describes as a “mini Home Depot.”

The unions filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on November 30, the day they announced the planned strike. It alleges that URMC has not bargained in good faith.

There have been 30 negotiating sessions since August, says Harrison, 1199’s vice president for the Rochester-Corning region, and in the last three, management has not responded to the unions’ most recent proposal.

While raising the starting wage is the main sticking point, he continues, other issues include health care, child care, giving union workers the same incentives for committing to take hard-to-staff shifts that nonunion personnel such as nurses get, and improved vacation. The union wants to get more time off for longtime workers, and to end the policy of requiring River Campus workers to use their vacation days if they want to get full paychecks while the university shuts down for holidays.

The workers who helped carry the hospital through the COVID pandemic deserve it, Harrison avers. For the past three years, “our folks have been very unselfish,” he says. “It has not been met with the gratitude, the appreciation, that our folks had hoped for.”

“I shouldn’t have to do two jobs, especially with me being there for 20 years,” says Shepherd.

Thanks for reading! If you value this reporting and would like to help keep Work-Bites on the job, please consider donating whatever you can today. Work-Bites is a completely independent nonprofit news organization dedicated to our readers — and we need your support!