Clinicians with the Berkshire Visiting Nurses Association are staging an action in Pittsfield, Massachusetts today as they continue to negotiate their first union contract with Berkshire Health Systems.
This afternoon, BVNA representatives will deliver a community petition supporting their contract demands to BHS Board of Trustees Vice Chair John Bissell at the offices of Greylock Federal Credit Union, where he serves as president and CEO.
Established in 1901, the BVNA and its roughly 60 members voted to join the Massachusetts Nurses Association in December 2021. The MNA represents around 900 registered nurses at Berkshire Medical Center, the county’s largest hospital that’s also managed by BHS. In a statement to WAMC, BHS says that it “deeply values our skilled and compassionate clinicians, who are integral to our mission of advancing the health and wellness of everyone in Berkshire County,” respects their right to free speech and assembly, and that it is committed to working with the unionized workers in good faith. Bissell did not respond to request for comment in time for broadcast.
WAMC spoke with physical therapist, BVNA employee, and MNA union co-chair Tamaryn Clowdus about what the organized health care professionals want to communicate to their managers and the community.
CLOWDUS: We voted to have a union about 18 months ago, and we have been negotiating with our managers for about a year, a little over a year. And we have cut down to some more hardcore issues that we're just not getting a lot of movement from them on. So, we're bringing our issues to the community to make them more aware of what's going on. And in particular, we're delivering a petition to a trustee of the health care system, because we feel part of their job is to help represent the issues of the people. So, and we have a petition of with over 350 signatures showing how the community supports us.
WAMC: Now, for those who don't fully understand what visiting nurses are, break it down for us- What exactly is this group of workers in the health care system? And what do they contribute to not just the Berkshires, but nationwide?
So, we are- And it's not just the nurses, it is healthcare professionals too. So, we are a union of all the nurses, social workers, and physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists. So, it's a really good group of people. We go into people's homes and provide the skilled health care that they require when they're too weak to be able to go to outpatient services. And there was a whole movement nationwide to discharge people quicker from the hospitals, so there's becoming a larger role within the home care setting for us to be able to provide these services. And it requires a really high level of skill and experience, because you when you're in the home, you don't have all of the health care support around you. You have to manage it, whatever's going before you, by yourself. So, there's just a really high demand and expectation of these conditions in the home.
What exactly are the sticking points as you work out this first union contract?
There're a few different sticking points. Of course, that the most common that everybody hears about is the wage, and more importantly, the productivity patient caseload expectation on the clinicians. They're both pretty big issues for us. I think the bigger one is the patient caseload. We did put forward a wage proposal that’s a little bit more, we feel, fair and equitable. And the they responded with only a 2% wage, when they have offered a 4% wage to all the health care professionals in their system, and then even higher, they agreed to a higher wage proposal to the hospital nurses’ union. The other issue that's really, really causing us to lose staff is the productivity expectation of the field staff. Because right now, we have several travelers, and even with the travelers who are being paid very top dollar, they have, sometimes, they have travelers end their contract early because the expectation is too unattainable.
If you had to boil down the main takeaway to the broader community about today's action, what would that be?
So, we need their help to speak to our managers to represent the community that it's important to get this language in our contract so we can make sure we provide, not only have the top staff to provide the care to our community, but also that we have the time to provide the care to our to our patients and the members of the community.
Now, talk to us about the staging for today's presentation of the petition. As I understand it, you've put together a banner of sorts out of the petition from community members.
Yeah, so we have a banner which states that our petition, about the community supporting us and for a fair contract, and we have the 300, I believe it's 350 signatures that we've gotten on the banner itself.
Take us inside the unionizing effort that's led to this point. What were the conversations like within the Berkshire Visiting Nurses Association leading up to the decision to actually form the union?
The main conversation that we had with our colleagues was just, it was time. This wasn't just about us, this was about our community. We were seeing changes that weren't good. We see heavier expectation and demand on homecare, like I said. They're discharging patients much quicker from the hospital, which is needed, but then that means they come home at a more acute phase, and we have to be able to have time to manage this. And we were finding that we were being pushed to a level that we didn't feel like we could continue to safely manage this. We were losing our work-life balance, we were finding we were working 10, 12 hours a day to try to manage what we were told was supposed to be a caseload of eight hours a day. And just to keep our patients safe, we were having to get more and more of our own time to do the care that we found that we were needing to deal with these more acute patients being discharged home.
Was there anything you gleaned from the other health care professionals in Berkshire County who have been unionized for longer than your group when it came down to deciding how to pursue some of these avenues or pursue methods and tactics towards securing contracts like the situation you find yourself in today?
To stay united, not to get discouraged. We are starting to reach out to the community more. They have told us that the community does offer a great support, has provided great support to them. So that's one of the things that we're doing now. We have really been trying to manage this kind of in our own little world, but we are, it's been close to 18 months, and it's really time to start to get this settled. So, we need to start bringing more pressure to get some movement from our managers. So, we're taking the advice of reaching out to our community and starting to get the support of the community behind us.
