“Our Plan to Win”: CWA Healthcare Worker Town Hall Assess Staffing, Plans for the Road Ahead

CWA District 1 represents more than 15,000 healthcare workers across New York and New Jersey who know better than anyone that our healthcare workforce is in crisis, and that understaffing has dire consequences for both workers and patients. In New York, we’ve managed to make serious headway in our fight for Safe Staffing, particularly with the 2021 Clinical Staffing Committees Law, but there’s still work to be done to make our healthcare centers safer. 

The Clinical Staffing Committees law requires every facility in New York to form joint labor/management committees to devise enforceable staffing plans for every unit and shift - but how effective has it been so far? What does staffing look like on the ground for the workers who live it every day? What’s next in this fight? Those were the questions that over 80 participants tackled during the CWA Healthcare Worker Town Hall held on October 24th over Zoom. 

“Long before the pandemic shined a light on staffing, we knew that staffing was the number one issue for healthcare workers everywhere,” said District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor. “CWA has been committed to the fight for better staffing and working conditions for healthcare workers for decades, and it’s remarkable that we’re finally seeing progress.”

Topics included:

• A brief history of the Clinical Staffing Committees legislation and where we are in the implementation timeline
• Our overall campaign for Safe Staffing and strategy to win
• Updates on the campaign
• Next steps and legislative campaigns coming up in New York related to staffing

You can watch a recording of the full Town Hall here.

Last week, CWA’s work on safe staffing in New York was highlighted in Crain’s New York Business, calling attention to the Clinical Staffing Committees law and the roadblocks to implementation, particularly the lack of data on the law’s implementation, as well as CWA’s efforts to address those issues and collect accurate data from our members.

“Patients and their families across New York deserve transparency around their care in order to make more informed

decisions,” said CWA District 1 Legislative Director Becca Miller, who helped draft the Clinical Staffing Committees law in 2021. “Workers also deserve the right to have this information publicly available so that they can continue to advocate for the resources and support they need in the workplace to ensure the health and safety of our communities.”

Read the full article here.

​WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Are you a healthcare worker in New York? We want to hear from you! We're launching a survey of our full healthcare membership in New York to assess how the law is working after a year of implementation. We want to know: do you feel that staffing has improved?

Everyone's input will be vital in building a strong campaign to make even more headway on staffing.

>>Click here to fill out the survey.