PITTSBURGH (PAI)—Prior overwhelming strike authorization plans led bosses at two Pittsburgh-area hospitals to sign historic contracts covering more than 1,100 nurses and support staffers combined, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania announced.
The pacts, reached within a three-day span of September 9-12, also were pushed into public consciousness by mass demonstrations by the nurses, taking their causes to the hospital customers in their battles with West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh and Allegheny Valley Hospital in suburban Natrona Heights.
Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, a former progressive state legislator, and Pittsburgh’s Democratic Mayor, Ed Gainey, both publicly backed the workers. The Allegheny Valley nurses and other workers were planning a strike authorization vote, while the West Penn nurses had already overwhelmingly authorized a strike.
SEIU announced on September 12 that both contracts passed by enormous margins. Each featured significant raises for underpaid nurses and hospital commitments to safe staffing ratios. Both were modeled on a prior pact SEIU reached with a third hospital, Allegheny General––part of the same chain––last fall.
The union believes the big raises in the new contracts will also stop “brain drain” and burnout among veteran nurses and health care staffers.
“Pennsylvania is short 20,000 nurses, the biggest shortfall in the U.S.,” veteran West Penn labor and delivery nurse Joanne Germanos noted.
“Four years ago, before we formed our union, my pay was capped at less than $40 an hour as an experienced nurse, and I saw experienced and knowledgeable nurses leave to pursue better-paying jobs for that reason,” she told the union.
“In this new contract, we’ve won a guarantee that no nurse with 20 years of licensure will make less than $50 an hour, and I’m excited to see the impact that has on nurse retention,” Germanos stated.
The new pact at Germanos’s hospital raises pay by an average of 24% over three years. The Allegheny Valley three-year contract has “an average 16% investment in pay and compensation, with some members receiving as much as 36%,” the union explained.
Both pacts provide “health benefits protected from cost increases, and a commitment to expanding steady positions so nurses no longer have to rotate between day and night shift, oftentimes within a single week,” the union said. The Allegheny Valley pact has a new higher minimum pay––$20 per hour––for patient care techs, housekeepers, dietary staff, and transporters.
Nurses will also get “a seat at the table” on staffing and shifts, West Penn anesthesia care nurse Jodi Faltin told the union. “This should be a profession where we have time to sleep, recover, and unwind before we come back to deliver another shift of lifesaving care. I’m excited to know our patients will be taken care of by nurses with a safe staffing ratio and a steady shift.”
The Allegheny Valley nurses won separate vacation, sick, and personal time. SEIU said few other hospital workers in southwestern Pennsylvania have those benefits. And that pact commits the hospital to new safety measures, notably “a weapons detection system at the main entrance and increased security presence.”
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