By Stephen Thompson
Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world. But when some nurses talk about what it’s like to work there, the environment they describe sounds more like a sweatshop than a top-notch academic medical center.
In an interview with Left Voice, one Hopkins nurse describes low pay, long hours, and understaffing that puts patients at risk. She also points out that, because of poor working conditions, the hospital has trouble retaining experienced nurses: “On shift the other day, I looked around and noticed that with just eight months of experience, I’m a middle-seniority nurse!” In response, Hopkins nurses are organizing a union with National Nurses United.
To learn more about the organizing effort, I sat down with Josh Pickett, a nurse who has worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital for two and a half years. He told me that administrators at the hospital pay themselves huge salaries—for example, in 2012, hospital president Ronald Peterson received fifteen million dollars. But Pickett says these high salaries come at a steep cost: “That has been done by cutting nurses’ benefits, consolidating units, doing more with less.” The hospital even saves money by using deficient equipment. “There were faulty gloves that would always break and issues with vital sign machines that weren’t working.”
Pickett said that nurses wanted to unionize because it would give them the power to address these problems and improve patient care. Interestingly, academic research does support the contention that when nurses unionize, patients are better off. For example, one analysis in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review concluded that “the presence of an R.N. union is associated with a reduction in mortality of about 0.8 percentage point”. Other studies have found similar positive effects. The reason is easy to understand—when nurses have some control over their work environments, are not overworked, and are not rushed from one patient to the next, they are better able to do their jobs.
Nevertheless, Pickett said hospital administrators are fighting the union effort, even spending hospital money on professional union busters who make $500 per hour or more. “The union busters are allowed to go into the unit at any time, and take nurses away from patient care during their shifts to go to these mandatory meetings. But when regular nurses on their break want to go and talk with other nurses in the break room or outside the unit, or on their down time, we’re prevented from doing so. We’re kicked off of the unit. We had security called on us by the administration.” Nevertheless, some of the administration’s strong-arm tactics seem to be backfiring. Pickett told me that Hopkins security officers themselves are poorly payed, creating a basis for solidarity between the different groups of workers.
Pickett seemed excited about the prospect of being part of National Nurses United. “They are a completely nurse-run and operated union. It’s not operated by, like, outside people who have nothing to do with medicine. From top to bottom, you have to be a bed-side nurse to be part of the governance structure of the union. Once we unionize, we will elect our own representatives from our unit,” Pickett told me. “It’s a very democratic union.”
Pickett also expressed solidarity with adjunct professors. “The nurses understand what they’re going through, and understand that they, like us, are being used to create the profit that’s not being adequately spread around.” He added: “If we all decide to unionize and have a voice at the table, that will create a better Hopkins and a better environment for everybody.”
Read the rest of Issue 1 here.
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