On top of the typical stresses, intense work, and long hours common to the profession, nurses working at smaller hospitals in more remote parts of the country face many unique challenges. With fewer staff and 24-7 services, facilities like the two Lehigh Valley Health Network hospitals in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, rely on nurses, nursing assistants, and other staff to perform many jobs simultaneously with little rest. But when nurses begin to leave for better working conditions and the hospital does not replace them, those who remain are put under even more strain, which endangers them and their patients. For workers with Schuylkill Hospital Nurses United, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this episode, we talk with two Schuylkill County nurses, Brandee Brown-Seigfried and Chrissy Newton, and Seth Goldstein from the Office and Professional Employees International Union, about the day-to-day grind of working in small-town hospitals while also combating union-busting and bad-faith bargaining from management.
Additional links/info below…
- Schuylkill Hospital Nurses United Twitter page
- Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
- Seth Goldstein Twitter page
- Lehigh Valley Health Network website and Twitter page
- “Lehigh Valley Health Network violated federal labor law by directing Schuylkill nurses to remove safe staffing stickers“
- Christine Lee, Yahoo! News, “Schuylkill County Nurses Criticize Health Network over Contract Negotiations“
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
- Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song”
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