2002: New Contracts And Opportunities for HPAE Members


For many HPAE members, 2002 will be an important year in their working lives, as more than 5,000 are in one of nine local HPAE unions negotiating new contracts this year.

As health care workers, those 5,000 plus HPAE members have many of the same contract issues and goals created by the persistent shortage of health care workers everywhere: winning the wage and benefit improvements that create incentives for people to work in health care, and agreeing on the enforceable safe staffing levels, and increased training and orientation measures that improve working conditions for health care workers that will keep them on-the-job. These demands are desperately needed in order to bring workers back into the health care field.

Increasing the Supply by Winning Demands.
With so many issues and problems in common, HPAE members in New Jersey and Pennsylvania got together in mid-January to compare notes and share strategies. One consensus reached at that meeting was that the solution to the problems health care workers face on-the-job was not exclusively about just dollars and cents.

"Common sense dictates that correcting the staff shortage means increasing wages and benefits for health care workers," states HPAE Local 5058 President Ruthann Kosick. “However, it’s just as important to win rights and protections in our contracts that prevent the persistent abuses that are driving workers out of health care. Unfortunately, that is the part of the solution to the staffing shortage that most employers still don't seem to get."

The meeting in January emphasized the need for employers to provide greater professional development options for workers, as well as more extensive orientation, mentoring and monitoring programs in order to aid in the retention of newly hired staff.

The reality is that wages and benefits remain important in attracting and retaining people in health care. Unfortunately, workers still have to fight to convince hospital managements to reward senior employees in proportion to their service time, as managements continue to prefer spending a disproportionate amount of money on new hires, including hiring bonuses, and temporary agency staff, while “shorting” retention measures.

"I have worked with agency nurses who say that they would come on staff full time if the salary was better," stated Local 5029 member Sally Monahan, RN, Pascack Valley, at her local union’s meeting in February. "And that means not only increasing wages but also ending the compression of nurses’ salaries; something that doesn’t happen in other professions."

Health Insurance Costs: Who Should Pay the Increase?
Health insurance and pension benefits are two major benefit issues that HPAE members will be dealing with in their respective negotiations. Union workers throughout the US have increasingly been asked to assume more of the cost of health insurance, as premiums continue to rise. In addition, many employers are also proposing that workers pay more for less, demanding that workers accept more restrictive health insurance plans with fewer benefits.

“We’ve bent over backwards in past years to work with our hospital to contain health insurance costs,” states Cynthia Martone, Vice President of Local 5004 Englewood Hospital. “However, our current plan has given many of our members problems. This year, we will be in no mood to agree to premium increases for a health plan plagued with so many problems.”