Bernie Sanders holds senate hearing to examine Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital nurses’ strike
This past Oct. 27, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) conducted a Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee hearing at New Brunswick’s Rutgers University campus. The hearing, entitled “Overworked and Undervalued: Is the Severe Hospital Staffing Crisis Endangering the Well-Being of Patients and Nurses?”, was designed to look at why nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) have remained on strike since Aug. 4, 2023.
As members of the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 4-200, RWJUH nurses maintain that management is refusing to negotiate on key unfair labor practices issues. USW LOCAL 4-200 wants the hospital to set safer staffing ratios on floors, increase salaries, and freeze workers’ insurance premiums.
Sanders opened the hearing by thanking nurses all over the country. “You can remember––because you lived through it––and I can remember 3,000 people a day dying during the worst public health crisis in 100 years. We can all remember hospitals overflowing with patients. And we remember nurses and doctors and other healthcare professionals going to work without the personal protective equipment they needed: they didn’t have the gloves, they didn’t have the masks, they didn’t have the gowns. And they went to work every day to save us. We owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.”
The senator said nurses have told his office that the main goal of their strike is getting better staffing ratios. They are unable to provide quality care for patients, he said, because of “the totally inadequate nurse-patient ratios that they are forced to deal with. What nurses in New Jersey, Vermont, and all over this country have told me is that they have been stretched to the breaking point. They told me that they are stressed out, they’re burnt out, and are leaving the profession they love in droves because they are overworked, undervalued, and are forced each and every day to do more work with less resources.”
Both USW 4-200 representatives and Mark Manigan, the president of RWJ Barnabas Health, which owns the hospital, and Alan Lee, president of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, were invited to take part in the Senate HELP hearing. The event was designed to see if Congress could aid in designing a resolution to the strike. Initially both Lee and Manigan said they were going to attend, but at the last minute, they instead sent statements into the hearing.
In one part of his testimony, Manigan said he was “troubled by the inaccurate and misleading assertions put forth by … Chairman [Sanders] in recent public comments. Unlike a significant number of healthcare organizations in the Northeast and around the country, RWJUH has safe staffing guidelines in place that are derived from national, evidence-based practice by peer academic medical centers. These guidelines were agreed to by the USW 4-200 negotiating committee, representing RWJUH nurses, in multiple contract settlement offers from the hospital that they failed to ratify. Our patients receive safe and compassionate care across all of our services, as evidenced by multiple quality indicators and national quality rankings, which reflect our unwavering commitment to the communities we serve.
“Our negotiating team at RWJUH has met with the union six (6) times since October 6, 2023, including [Sunday, October 22], with the goal of reaching a fair and equitable resolution that provides the highest-quality patient care and creates a safe and supportive working environment for our nurses. I believe and humbly ask that you understand that is where my focus should be at this time, as well as working with our team to maintain the delivery of care for our patients.”
But Judy Danella, a staff nurse at RWJ Barnabas Health who also serves as president of United Steelworkers Local 4-200 countered Manigan’s claims: “One of the main reasons we find ourselves in this situation is because of chronic understaffing by hospitals, which has made the nursing profession increasingly unsafe—both for nurses and their patients,” Danella said.
When hospitals are understaffed, she insisted, nurses risk getting hurt on the job. Instead of remaining in an unsafe position, they will look for another job and that only worsens the understaffing issue.
“In addition to making it more difficult to retain our existing workforce, this vicious cycle also makes it harder to recruit new nurses,” Danella added. “I have seen firsthand that hospitals now prefer to hire younger—often cheaper—nurses to replace the experienced professionals who have quit their jobs due to burnout or injury. The result has been to bring in young nurses directly out of college—many with no prior clinical training—and to put them directly on the hospital floor, with as many as five or six patients at a time. Being a nurse is not easy, and it requires a significant amount of training, both for the technical and emotional skills required to
do the job.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Sen. Sanders spoke about wanting to create a federal standard for nurse-patient ratios.
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