Local 5105 Session 2 Bargaining Update

In our bargaining session with Virtua yesterday, it was very clear that that the hospital has very different priorities than we do. While we are focused on providing the best quality care for our patients through safe staffing and language that will help us recruit and retain nurses, Virtua wants us to do more with less. They rejected all of our language on staffing and retention, including staffing ratios, and proposed multiple changes that would make it harder for us to do our jobs.

The hospital announced yesterday that MASC will be coming under Virtua’s license, and proposed to merge MASC into the hospital OR PACU and SAA clinical groupings. They also proposed to group 2N with ICU/CCU to care for 2N patients in ICU, and allow for one way pulls from MBU to L&D to care for a well infant. We don’t have to tell you all the ways that this would make it more difficult for us to safely care for our patients.

On Wednesday April 12th, we’ll be handing out flyers and safe staffing magnets to our members outside the employee entrances at 6:30am and 6:30pm to demand that Virtua get serious about our staffing language and back off of their proposals to make us do more with less. Please sign up here to attend so we can send a strong message to the hospital that we need a contract that allows us to give the quality care that our patients need: https://actionnetwork.org/events/local-5105-april-12-flyering-for-safe-staffing/

Our next session will be on April 18th on Zoom, and you can sign up to attend here: https://www.hpae.org/2023/03/local-5105-negotiations-session-sign-up/. Also, we’ll be inviting nurses from affected units to speak on all the problems with managements proposals at future sessions, so be on the lookout for opportunities to make your voices heard. As long as we stand together, we can win the strong contract that we, our patients and our community need.

In solidarity,

Your Local 5105 Bargaining Committee