Saturday, October 03, 2020
Nursing Home workers at Bannister House in Providence have gone on strike over demand for better conditions and higher pay.
Bannister has seen nearly 100 cases of the coronavirus and nearly 20 deaths, including at least one staff member.
Direct caregivers are paid as little as $12 per hour.
"That we have tried to pay them $12 an hour for as long as I can remember is a shame — it’s embarrassing," said Dr. Michael Fine, former Rhode Island Director of the Department of Health on GoLocal LIVE Friday. "These are people who need to make a decent living wage."
"They do really hard work, and important work, and darn if that shouldn’t be recognized," Fine added. "And it seems we’ve learned nothing about having a health care system — instead of an industry. When you make it an industry, and make it for-profit, all sorts of abuses will occur. And that’s something I hope we learn something about, and learn something about soon."
Fine warns however that a strike at Bannister under current conditions creates a health risk to the residents.
"The risk to the residents when their usual caretakers go out on strike are multiple," said Fine. "The people who come in to do the work, you don’t know how schooled they are in infection control, and what you lose is the intimacy of the relationships."
"I’ve been in many of these nursing homes, and I’ve always been so impressed by the way the CNAs and nurses really know and care about the residents as if they are family. And when you lose that connection, you’re going to see real problems, as people miss subtle changes that tell you about the onset of disease in older people," he added.
SEIU who represents many of the workers calls the pay structure “ poverty wages.”
“After submitting contract proposals over one year ago that would create safe staffing standards of 4.1 direct-care hours, wage boosts, affordable healthcare and training opportunities, Bannister Center has not accepted these proposals at the bargaining table, despite caregivers risking personal safety for months throughout the COVID-19 crisis,” says the union.
“We made the difficult decision to strike because we feel that management is putting us at risk each day by refusing to give us safe staffing, especially during the pandemic. I contracted COVID three different times; the first time I was out of work from April 8 all the way to June 2,” said Tenah Nimmo-Powell, who works as a transporter and supply clerk. “We need the company owners who sit behind desks in New York to start valuing the safety of caregivers and residents. We need more staff, better wages and health care we can afford.”
Bannister Center, owned by an out-of-state corporation, Centers Health Care, has had 15-20 COVID-19 resident and caregiver deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. Frontline caregivers, overwhelmingly Black and Brown women, are paid a starting rate of only $12 an hour. Despite healthy profits and large windfalls of federal funding, Bannister’s New York-based management decided to disregard the urgent needs of health care heroes who have shown up everyday in a deadly pandemic to provide high quality compassionate care.
Nursing Home Owners Fire Back
Spokesperson Jeff Jacomowitz of the New York-based Centers Health Care -- that has a mixed record in Rhode Island and across the country -- said in a statement, “Since the onset of the unprecedented global COVID-19 pandemic Bannister Center, along with all the other long-term care facilities in the state, have been under tremendous regulatory and financial stress. As a result, we are at a point in time where it is not feasible to add a new large financial commitment. Bannister Center understands and empathizes with our employees and therefore offered the employees a short-term contract with an immediate bump in pay, a reduction in health care premiums, and a COVID-19 hazard pay bonus. The goal of the offer was to ensure that our employees receive something now and then reopen negotiations in 12 months when we are hopefully through this pandemic."
"It is with disappointment that we were informed that the contract offer was rejected by the union who instead directed our employees to call a 3-day strike. Although it is the employees right to strike, we believe that the timing of the strike, during a global pandemic and in the middle of an outbreak, is ill-advised," said Jacomowitz.
"We have arranged to cover the facility with temporary nurses and other health care workers so that the residents at Bannister Center receive the care they deserve. We are open to having dialogue with the union and hope to have resolution in the near future,” he added.
The head of the nursing home association criticized the strike. RIHCA President and CEO Scott Fraser said, “The effect of a walkout on residents during a pandemic at a nursing home is clear – it’s a harmful and heartless thing to do as it puts residents in the home at risk. Many of our residents have the same workers caring for them day in and day out. Today – and possibly for days longer -- those workers will be missing from their bedside; quite a discomforting experience."
“Today, it is sad to watch workers abandon the residents we know many of them are very close to. We hope the workers will see this clearly and come back to their places of work to negotiate at the table,” Fraser added.
Rhode Island currently ranks 41st in the nation for average hours of care nursing home residents receive. Studies show that infection-control violations are significantly higher in short-staffed facilities, according to the union.
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