{"id":1256089,"date":"2023-10-09T11:44:33","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T11:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/10\/robert-wood-johnson-hospital-nurses-strike-new-jersey-short-staffing\/"},"modified":"2023-10-09T11:44:33","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T11:44:33","slug":"nurses-in-new-jersey-are-on-strike-against-short-staffed-hospitals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/09\/nurses-in-new-jersey-are-on-strike-against-short-staffed-hospitals\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurses in New Jersey Are on Strike Against Short-Staffed Hospitals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, have now been on strike for two months, demanding that the hospital increase pay and address short-staffing issues that ultimately hurt the quality of care.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Exterior view of the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (Bobby Bank \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

There ought to be nine nurses on the day shift at 9 Tower, a trauma surgery unit inside the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) in New Brunswick, New Jersey.<\/p>\n

Instead, some days there are just three.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I\u2019d look at a patient\u2019s face and know that I won\u2019t be able to maybe help feed them when they need to be fed,\u201d said nurse Sophia Moccio, \u201cor clean them when they need to be cleaned. It is distressing, and depressing for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Staffing levels this bad are a major reason why she and 1,700 of her coworkers at RWJUH have been on strike since August 4.<\/p>\n

Nurses in her thirty-four-bed unit often have to manage the care of six patients apiece \u2014 and sometimes seven or eight. \u201cMost of the patients are dealing with some really traumatic brain injury or something similar, and they need constant care and a watchful eye,\u201d Moccio said. \u201cBut it\u2019s hard to do that when you\u2019re having six patients at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Short staffing and burnout \u2014 long-standing issues for nurses across the country \u2014 are worse than ever. Since the start of COVID, RWJUH nurses say, they\u2019ve seen many colleagues leave the profession or retire, pushed past their limits.<\/p>\n

And for newer nurses like Moccio, the heavy patient loads are a \u201ctrial by fire\u201d that leaves people \u201cburnt out and exhausted,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany nurses feel their values as medical professionals are being ignored, or compromised,\u201d Moccio said. \u201cIf the concerns of nurses aren\u2019t taken more seriously, the cycle will perpetuate itself, and more will continue to retire or just leave the field.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

\u201cAn Abusive Relationship\u201d<\/h2>\n \n

RWJUH is a 965-bed academic medical center associated with the medical school at Rutgers, and a level-one trauma center.<\/p>\n

The nurses there, members of United Steelworkers Local 4-200, have now been on strike for two months. Meanwhile, rather than bargain, the hospital administration has found ways to retaliate \u2014 like stripping nurses of their health insurance on September 1.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all the trademarks of an abusive relationship,\u201d Moccio said. \u201cThere is gaslighting. There is deceiving. They leverage these words of kindness, sweetness, and thankfulness for what we do while continually reminding us not to ask administration for what we need, and telling us we\u2019re greedy when we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nurses proposed a 10 percent pay increase; the hospital countered with 3 percent. On staffing, the administration has offered only \u201cguidelines\u201d that would allow it to disregard safe staff-to-patient ratios if nurses called out sick.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is designed to pit nurses against each other,\u201d Moccio said, \u201cto pin the blame on nurses who might feel sick or overworked, when it\u2019s the hospital administration that\u2019s not doing their job.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Scabs Paid Double<\/h2>\n \n

The hospital remains open, because the administration has been hiring traveling nurses to cross the picket lines. According to HealthJob, the average weekly travel nurse contract in New Brunswick was $4,405 per week, twice the national average for travel nurses.<\/p>\n

A court has ruled against picketing outside the hospital, claiming it\u2019s too disruptive. Now an injunction bars the nurses from gathering in large groups outside the hospital; they cannot delay or obstruct scab nurses from entering.<\/p>\n

Five weeks into the strike, the nurses marched on the home of one of the hospital\u2019s CEOs. Six weeks in, faced with a federal mediator\u2019s proposal to accept management\u2019s offer or submit to binding arbitration, the nurses voted by a resounding 89 percent to reject the latest offer and continue their strike.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope, and why I voted for this strike, was not just for the benefit of patients and nurses at our hospital, but to open a conversation about what does nursing need in this time period, especially in a so-called post-COVID world,\u201d Moccio said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur issues are not specific to New Brunswick or to New Jersey. What we\u2019re asking for is what all nurses should be asking for throughout the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The faculty and graduate worker unions at Rutgers are supporting the strike; so are other unions and community groups. The strikers have garnered the public support of Senator Bernie Sanders, who also supported the Rutgers faculty strike<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Until recently New Jersey governor Phil Murphy had said little about the strike beyond urging \u201cboth sides\u201d to get along. But in recent weeks he has become more vocal, praising the nurses.<\/a><\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

As Few Nurses as Possible<\/h2>\n \n

Earlier this year, after a three-day strike, seven thousand nurses at two major hospitals in New York City won a groundbreaking contract<\/a> improving staff-to-patient ratios.<\/p>\n

Californian nurses won a safe-staffing law in 1999, though it wasn\u2019t until 2019 that another law was added to penalize hospitals that don\u2019t comply. Even so, according to a 2010 study, nurses in California<\/a> experienced less burnout and less dissatisfaction with their jobs than nurses elsewhere \u2014 and for patients, the mortality rate was lower.<\/p>\n

New Jersey nurses rallied this year to support a bill, A4536<\/a>, that would establish California-style safe-staffing ratios at hospitals and surgical facilities. No success so far.<\/p>\n

\u201cHospitals operate under the brutal and confounding economics of American health care,\u201d New York Times<\/em> opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen wrote recently<\/a>. \u201cOur system treats nurses more as a cost center than a value creator, so that the goal in too many cases becomes as few nurses as possible caring for as many patients as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There ought to be nine nurses on the day shift at 9 Tower, a trauma surgery unit inside the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Instead, some days there are just three. \u201cSometimes I\u2019d look at a patient\u2019s face and know that I won\u2019t be able to maybe help feed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1256089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1256090,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256089\/revisions\/1256090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1256089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1256089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1256089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}