UE Convention Resolutions
Rights of the Healthcare Worker
Healthcare in the U.S. is in a state of crisis, with healthcare workers and patients suffering in a deteriorating healthcare environment. To improve our nation’s healthcare delivery system for workers and patients, we must address problems contributing to the current crisis, and insist on protecting the rights for those who deliver and receive care.
The cost of healthcare is skyrocketing, increasing many times faster than our wages and the economy. Faced with these increases, the system’s major players – insurance and pharmaceutical companies – and bosses are reducing their costs and bills by shifting all costs onto the backs of workers, patients and government.
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities, both public and private, have responded to this financial pressure in a variety of ways, none of them effective. In an effort to gain leverage with stingy insurers, hospital systems have gone on merger and acquisition binges, hoping to gain clout in negotiations over reimbursement rates. Many have also converted to for-profit status, on the misguided theory that the "discipline of the market" will help them to achieve financial stability. While a few hospital systems have become profitable, many others have simply bankrupted themselves, leaving whole communities with no healthcare facilities at all. Small community-based hospitals, when they are not bought outright by large systems, have an especially difficult time surviving in this environment.
All hospitals and other healthcare facilities are aggressively cutting costs. Many deny care to patients without medical insurance or who carry inadequate insurance. Trauma centers must provide emergency care to all who need it, and this has sadly resulted in the closing of emergency rooms. Cost-cutting schemes dramatically affect staff. This in turn has a profound impact on the quality of care. Patients are put into dangerous and often life-threatening situations as staff is reduced. Patients who have "coded" by going into cardiac or respiratory arrest have gone unattended until it is too late. Not enough staff was available to check the patient on a routine basis. Regular patient bathing is not always performed when aides are not available, and the nursing staff is so overworked that their attention is directed to more critical problems. Patients develop bedsores due to lack of movement and regular position changes. Many patients, unable to feed themselves, have food brought to them but have no one to help them get it into their mouths. It also takes investment money to keep up with new and advancing technologies; therefore properly maintained and up-to-date equipment is not always available, leaving the healthcare worker to make do with inadequate resources. Often, even the most basic supplies are too much to hope for. Linens, sterile supplies, intravenous fluids, hygiene and isolation supplies are only a few of the materials that are no longer routinely available.
It is usually the healthcare worker or the housekeeping staff, rather than management, who is blamed for breakdowns in patient care. The presumption here is that poor patient care stems from workers’ inattention or slacking. But staff could not be working harder than they already are. Often forced into working mandatory overtime, through breaks, or without a meal, front-line care givers have a hard time maintaining peak performance. Decision making and reaction time lag when too few workers care for too many people, resulting in dangerous situations for worker and patient alike.
We need to guard the mental and physical health of the healthcare worker by creating and enforcing state and federal laws governing rest and meal breaks and the ratio of patients assigned to each staff person. There are only eight states that have laws pertaining to breaks and 17 states that have some sort of regulation for meal periods. Only seven states have some kind of regulation which provides that employees must receive one day off from work out of every seven (essentially, one day a week). The only state in the country with a maximum number of hours for some healthcare employees is California, where the standard is 72 hours. Currently only California has a staffing ratio law. And that legislation is limited to nursing staff only.
In this deteriorating healthcare environment, the morale of staff is jeopardized, as are their living standards. It is obvious that management is not concerned with the welfare of the staff but is wholly absorbed in the business of cost-cutting. Management has stopped investing in the workforce by refusing to pay staff salaries that keep up with inflation, offer decent retirement plans, or affordable healthcare plans for workers and their families. The healthcare worker is exposed day in and day out to diseases and illnesses that sometimes are resistant to antibiotic treatment and can be deadly. They are the ones who need to make sure that they don’t take it home to their families. They are the ones that need to be assured that they will have adequate healthcare and medical benefits available to them in their time of need. It is outrageous that many healthcare organizations do not recognize the necessity of medical coverage for their employees. Many healthcare workers — aides, housekeepers, orderlies, transportation support, darkroom technicians, clerks and food service — make little more than minimum wage but are expected to pay large deductions for substandard health coverage. The result of such shabby treatment is frequent employee turnover. Ironically, this forces management to spend inordinate resources on training new hires, to hire temporaries or "travelers" and to rely on registry personnel who demand higher wages than loyal long-term employees receive. Educational leaves and continuing education programs that permit staff to learn up-to-date techniques and keep their licenses current are not taken seriously.
In the wake of these healthcare deformities the healthcare industry has lost much of its attractiveness as a profession. The abandonment of healthcare by talented workers and declining entrance into the field predicts a healthcare staff crisis in the making. Those individuals who are so dedicated to caring for others need respect and recognition. The health of the nation depends upon it.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 70th UE CONVENTION:
- Encourages all healthcare workers to organize as the best means to win their rights as workers and to fight effectively for their patients;
- Calls on federal and state legislators to:
- Initiate safe staffing levels in all healthcare facilities with effective enforcement;
- Block mandatory overtime in the healthcare field and initiate legislation mandating rest and meal breaks with effective enforcement;
- Institute a single-payer healthcare system, in line with UE policy;
- Pass legislation requiring equipment in medical settings to be maintained at regular intervals;
- Institute funding of medical equipment in areas of need;
- Institute legislation allowing medical workers the ability to take paid leaves of absence for the purpose of education in their fields and initiate free and/or affordable educational programs for the purpose of training and attracting individuals into the ancillary medical professions;
- Institute legislation for a fair wage and benefits package for healthcare workers, including pension and family medical coverage;
- Prohibit institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid dollars from interfering with the rights of their employees to choose a workplace representative of their choosing.