Your Union bargaining team has repeatedly offered adjustments to our contract proposals in an effort to find common ground, while maintaining our insistence on safe patient care practices and fairness for Nurses. Despite our efforts, management refuses to acknowledge that floating Nurses to units where they lack current validated competency is risky for patients and for Nurses’ licenses, and is an invitation to tragedy. The next time both sides meet, bargaining will be mediated by a government representative from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Federal mediators sometimes step in—at the request of the parties—to help push the process along.
We Insist on Safe Floating Practices
Garfield Medical Center management has made clear throughout our bargaining sessions that they are determined to put your nursing license at risk when it’s convenient for them. Our proposal provides a way to float Nurses in a way that is safe for patients and safe for your license. Your bargaining team proposes:
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Nurses to have completed orientation in their home unit and be working on their own
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Nurses to have worked in their home unit for six months (9 before floating to critical care areas)
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Nurses to have received orientation and have demonstrated competency in the unit you are floated to
Unfortunately, patient safety is an unconvincing argument to management’s bargaining team. They will need to hear from you that patient safety needs to come first.
Unfair Labor Practices and Unsafe Workload Changes in the ER
Garfield management recently began imposing a disturbing new policy on ER Nurses that increases their workload and divides their attention from treating patients. This comes at a time when ER Nurses have been trying to get management to take staffing issues seriously. Management informed us they have no plan to address understaffing in the ER, yet they have chosen to put their time and effort into devising ways to impose additional burdens.
These upside-down priorities show the fundamental difference between bedside Nurses, who want only to provide patients with the best quality care possible, and management, who prioritizes revenue generation and sees providing patient care services as just a means to that end. This unilateral change also violates the hospital’s legal obligation to bargain over changes to working conditions.
We don’t know how it’s possible to forget Nurses have a Union that must be negotiated with, while at the same time management is at the bargaining table negotiating a new contract. But in any case, the Union has filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board so that management can be held accountable, so that they will bargain with the Union (as is their legal obligation), and as in all negotiations, your bargaining team will advocate for what is in the best interests of patient safety.
