ALBANY — Albany Medical Center leaders on Friday vowed that patient care will not be impacted in the event that nurses follow through with a strike planned for Dec. 1.
The New York State Nurses Association, the union that represents Albany Med nurses, announced Thursday night that it would be issuing a notice of intent to strike after members rejected a contract proposal from hospital management this week that one nurse called a “slap in the face” to nurses who for years have fought for better wages, benefits and staffing levels.
“The benefits package that they touted is worse than what we had before the union was voted in and the wages that they offered are just disgusting,” said Lenore Granich, a nurse who serves on the bargaining committee.
Granich and several dozen other nurses clad in red NYSNA gear gathered outside the hospital’s pillars entrance Friday morning to detail the concerns they say are driving their most recent showdown with Albany Med, which follows two and a half years’ worth of bargaining sessions that began after their vote to unionize in April 2018.
The strike they are planning for Dec. 1 would start at 7 a.m. and last 24 hours. Albany Med leaders held a news conference Friday afternoon to counter the nurses’ claims that the strike is necessary, and condemned the union for calling a strike amid a global pandemic.
“A strike is always, by definition, disruptive to a medical mission,” Albany Med president and CEO Dennis McKenna said. “But a strike in the middle of a pandemic for baseless reasons is totally irresponsible.”
In a statement to the Times Union, hospital spokesman Matt Markham said nurses who choose to strike “will have made the choice to abandon their patients.”
The hospital has made plans to hire temporary nurses to fill in on Dec. 1 for nurses who do choose to strike, said Dr. Fred Venditti, executive vice president for system care delivery and hospital general director. He and McKenna pledged Friday that services would remain open and available, and care would not be disrupted as a result of the strike.
“Albany Med will not abandon its mission to care for our patients and community, and I thank the many colleagues who will choose to work during the day of the strike,” McKenna said. “As the number of coronavirus cases continues to rise in our region, our community is relying on us now more than ever.”
Pandemic concerns
Nurses who gathered outside the hospital Friday expressed disgust that hospital leadership would accuse them of abandoning patients, and invoke the pandemic as a reason not to strike. Nurses are only planning to strike, they say, because they have been forced to work in unsafe conditions for too long.
“Albany Med has abandoned us and the patients for a long time,” said Jennifer Bejo, a nurse in the hospital’s medical ICU who has been involved in bargaining efforts. “If you do not take care of the essential workers, of the front line workers, that means that you’re also abandoning the patients that those nurses take care of. You’re abandoning the community. We deserve to be respected, especially during this pandemic, and especially as the surge starts up again.”
Nurses expressed concern Friday that they are again being asked to reuse single-use N95 masks — something the hospital did in the spring when it was inundated with COVID-19 patients and supply lines were scarce. Albany Med says the masks are disinfected in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards and reused in order to conserve supplies that could once again grow scarce.
Granich said one Albany Med unit had at least 10 nurses fall ill with the virus in the last week, and said management has blamed staff for not wearing PPE appropriately.
“I’m wearing an N95 mask that’s been disinfected I don’t know how many times so the integrity of that mask is now depleted and you’re gonna blame me for contracting a highly contagious virus that you are putting me in jeopardy of contracting because of the crappy PPE that you’re making me wear?” Granich said. “Come on.”
McKenna accused the union of exploiting the pandemic for bargaining purposes, pointing to the fact that there are “no open items” in contract negotiations related to PPE or equipment sterilization.
Staffing concerns
While pandemic-related concerns were a part of Friday’s rally, nurses say their motivation for striking stems from long-held concerns over the role staffing plays in patient care.
Nurses with too many patients to look after don’t have enough time to give each patient the attention they deserve, they say. And while they can’t legally be forced to work overtime, nurses say staffing shortages and concern for patient care continuity often result in them feeling guilted into working overtime. The consequence of this is burnout and high turnover, they say.
The hospital could counter this, nurses contend, by investing in recruitment and retention of its nursing workforce through higher wages, better health benefits and giving nurses a voice when it comes to establishing unit staffing ratios. Instead, they are spending money on attorneys to fight unionization and coalition-building efforts, Granich said.
“Over 20 percent of our nursing staff have to put their children on Child Health Plus (the state’s low-income health plan for children) to have affordable health insurance,” Granich said. “That speaks volumes that nurses have to put their children on a state-funded plan to be able to support their family when they’re working for the largest employer in the city of Albany.”
Albany Med has repeatedly denied that its staffing levels aren’t up to snuff, but also admit that they — like other hospitals around the state — are at the mercy of a nationwide nursing shortage.
McKenna said Friday that nurses are paid competitive salaries and said nurses were offered a contract this week that reflects “the fundamental principles” of safety, fairness, fiscal responsibility and quality. They were offered a merit plan allowing 3 percent pay raises for the next three years and staffing to national benchmarks, he said.
Granich said the contract only guarantees a 1.25 percent annual raise, with the potential to receive another 1.75 percent increase based on merit.
“That is a subjective thing,” she said. “You know as well as I do that if your nurse manager doesn’t like you or due to this crap that’s going on now — they don’t have to give you the full 3 percent.”
Accusations of 'stacked vote'
She was referring to the heightened tensions between nurses and management that have been a hallmark of the last few years. Both Albany Med and the union have filed unfair labor practice charges against one another with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing each side of intimidating or soliciting the other with propaganda and harassment.
Bejo, the ICU nurse, said Friday that she was disciplined for talking to other nurses about union issues while on breaks — something that is protected by federal labor law.
“It’s the culture,” she said. “Management just does not want to relinquish the control and power over their staff and employees, and that is wrong. We are at the bedside. We are the ones working 24 hours inside the hospital. We are the ones who care for everybody, for our colleagues, for our patients, for our communities. And I think we have that right to be able to be at the table when discussing issues that affect our working conditions.”
At Friday’s news conference, McKenna said he is confident that “many nurses” will choose not to strike on Dec. 1 and accused the union of rushing the contract vote. Membership was asked to vote on the 120-page contract proposal just 18 hours after it was presented to NYSNA, he said. He also claimed that “hundreds” of nurses were turned away from voting.
“This was a stacked vote and it produced exactly the votes that NYSNA and a small vocal minority of nurses wanted — a strike,” he said.
NYSNA said only members who had signed union membership cards were allowed to vote, and that the number of nurses who refused to sign cards in order to vote "was in the single digits."
"The contract proposed by the hospital was voted down by the nurse members, after two years of hard bargaining," said Eric Smith, a field director for the union."To say that our dedicated nurses did not know what they were voting on is insulting – there have been hundreds of briefing meetings and we were very clear what was in the proposal. It’s this type of insulting AMC thinking that led to the 2-to-1 unionization vote for NYSNA."
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