Healthcare Workers Step Up to Staff Up

This month we opened a new chapter in our ongoing fight for Safe Staffing in our healthcare centers!

On December 8th, CWA District 1 held our first Staffing Captains Training to discuss New York State's new Staffing Committees Law, which aims to reduce understaffed hospital shifts throughout the state, and to make sure that our members know how to recognize and report staffing violations.

The Staffing Committees Law is a major step forward in our decades-long fight for safe staffing. Critically short staffing impacts not only healthcare workers, who are often forced to skip breaks and forego meals and care for many more patients than they safely should be, but also impacts the patients they care for and our communities at large. CWA submitted our first piece of Safe Staffing legislation in New York more than 20 years ago, after the California Nurses Association successfully lobbied their state legislature and won legislation mandating minimum staffing ratios in California’s healthcare facilities in 1999.

The powerful hospital lobby in New York has blocked our attempts to make our facilities safer for years, but in 2021 we won a major breakthrough with our Staffing Committees Law, requiring hospital management to collaborate in equal parts with workers to set staffing ratios for all units and all shifts - and imposes stiff penalties if plans are not followed.

CWA District 1 is now rolling out a series of trainings over the next several months to go over the ins and outs of the new law, and how to recognize and track violations of the staffing plans.