NEW YORK, NY—On Tuesday, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) announced that it had reached a tentative agreement with Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai West, St. Luke’s, New York Presbyterian, and Montefiore hospitals.
The four-year agreement affects approximately 10,000 RNs working for the hospitals.
The tentative agreement, according to NYSNA, “includes historic staffing ratio language calling for the initial hiring of more than 1450 nurses.”
The initial hires will include nurses to fill current vacancies, and will also include an additional $100 million dollars to hire nurses for newly added full-time positions
However, it appears NYSNA’s staffing ratio is not quite as restrictive as that which has been instituted in California.
“Union leadership and management will assign nurse-to-patient ratios based on how sick the patients are in a given unit,” reported Crain’s New York Business. “But unlike California state law, there will not be a maximum number of patients that a given nurse can treat at one time.”
In its annual report to the Department of Labor, NYSNA reported that union dues charged to its 37,187 members were between $886 and $1295 in 2018.
As New York is not a Right-To-Work state, if the hospitals do, in fact, hire 1450 new RNs, the union stands to gain between $1,284,700 and $1,877,750 in additional union dues per year.
The contract also includes across the board wage increases of 3%, as well as retiree health benefits, tuition reimbursement as well as other monetary benefits,
