The New York State Nurses Association’s year of fiery activism has finally paid off for the city’s public nursing workforce.
The nurses union announced Monday night that it had reached a contract agreement with New York City Health + Hospitals that includes a significant pay increase effective immediately and a
several measures aimed to address the ongoing problem of understaffing.
The union says the pay raises, in concert with staffing programs like a floating pool of nurses and new patient-to-nurse ratios, will help city hospitals retain nursing staff.
“When we fight, we win. NYSNA NYC public sector nurses have always been on the forefront of the fight for social justice and health equity for our patients, and they demonstrated throughout this contract campaign they were ready to do whatever it takes to win respect for nurses and patients,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a statement.
The agreement comes on the heels of a series of escalating rallies and protests that the public nurses organized in recent months. While public sector nurses are barred by state law from going on strike, the union raised many of the issues at stake in the H+H contract while conducting successful strikes at two private hospitals—Mount Sinai and Montefiore—in January.
The contract, which is for 5 1/2 years, will extend two years of “pay parity” raises to all of the city’s over-8,000 H + H nurses, in line with what nurses earn in the private sector. They will get an additional $16,006 in their first year, and another $5,551 in their second year, bringing starting nurse salaries up to $106,000 per year.
In the third and fourth years nurses will receive a 3% salary increase and in the fifth a 3.5% increase.
Alizia McMyers, vice president of NYSNA’s NYC H+H Executive Council said that the pay scale will provide hospitals the mechanism to compete with the private sector in recruiting nurses.
“Prior to our wonderful contract yesterday, we were deficient in the ability to recruit enough nurses based on the salary scale. If you’re already making, say, almost $20,000 more at another facility prior to yesterday, why would you come to seek out employment at an H+H facility?” she said.
The agreement will also improve existing staff-to-patient ratios. It will establish a one-to-two nurse to patient ratio in post-anesthesia care units, a one-to-one ratio for patients requiring critical care and one-to-four ratio for patients waiting to be transferred out.
The contract also creates a new system-wide pool of floating nurses, which will help cut down on the costly practice of using temporary or travel nurses to plug holes in the workforce that took hold since the pandemic. Last year H+H spent $549 million on temporary nurses to cover roughly 2,000 vacancies across its facilities. Though the union didn’t yet have a specific number of how many floating nurses H+H would hire, a spokesperson clarified that they will be cross-trained for the role.
The historic pay raises at public hospitals came six months after NYSNA made national waves for its three-day strike at Montefiore in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Harlem. In those contracts the union similarly was able to secure lower patient-to-staff ratios at Montefiore and pay raises at Mount Sinai.
In early June, the union narrowly averted another strike at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, a private hospital, over staffing levels. After delivering a strike notice to the hospital at the end of May, NYSNA nurses ended up winning pay raises and the staffing proposals at the last minute.
The union will hold an endorsement vote for the contract over the next week.
“We’ve worked so very hard these past three years. Many of us have suffered a lot of losses. It’s a huge win for all of the nurses, but specifically for the communities that we serve,” McMyers said.
Read more: Visit The Glade at the 9/11 Memorial – Pay Your Respects
