"We’re fighting for our community, for our patients": Interview with Michael Fitzsimmons of NYSNA at AMC
by Sean Collins
Photo Credit: Jon Flander.
In early 2018, over 2,000 nurses at Albany Medical Center (commonly referred to as Albany Med) made history by voting 2-to-1 to join the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). The 750-plus-bed Level-1 trauma center is the flagship hospital and medical college of a four-hospital, 1,500-bed health system. It is one of the largest private employers in the Capital Region of New York and the flagship hospital was entirely non-union until 2018, following three failed votes in the early 2000s.
After two years of bargaining, Albany Med management introduced their last, best, and final offer. Nurses rejected the proposal and instead voted to authorize a one day strike earlier this month in the midst of a record-breaking surge of COVID cases and related hospitalizations. After joining nurses on their picket line in December, Strikewave spoke with Michael Fitzsimmons, a registered nurse in the cardiac ICU unit and member of the union's negotiating committee, after the strike to learn more about the conditions in the hospital and what led nurses to take to the picket lines.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Strikewave (SW): On December 1, you and your coworkers struck for one day at Albany Medical Center after two years of bargaining for your first contract. What precipitated this?
Michael Fitzsimmons (MF): Management gave us a last and final offer. Basically, they have not recognized the issues we have tried to address. We feel disrespected. They gave us this final offer before Thanksgiving, right as COVID is starting to increase significantly in our area. We know how much the pandemic affected all of us in the spring. We’re all worried and we want to have a voice in all these things. When Albany Med gave us this last and final offer, it didn’t really change anything in terms of things we bring up—like having a voice, personal protective equipment (PPE), staffing, and being able to retain our nurses. That’s a big thing. But it really just comes down to respect. We raise things, we have ideas, and they tell us that they aren’t going to consider anything. We presented language around participating in a labor-management group to deal with this recent COVID surge. They rejected it outright.
SW: One of the things I heard on the picket line was regarding the surge in cases and number of hospitalizations locally. Nurses felt that Albany Med was less prepared this time around for the surge than they were in the spring. What does that look like in the hospital? How can you possibly be less prepared?
MF: That’s the dilemma. Albany Med’s thinks it’s acceptable to reuse N-95 masks. Now everything we read and know from experience suggests that once a N-95 mask gets cleaned and after two or three uses, it isn’t as good anymore—and it doesn’t feel right. This is what we use when we treat a patient who has COVID or is suspected of having COVID. They also decided to depersonalize the use of these masks. Before, you would get your own mask back; now they just throw them in a pile and you could get any one of them back for reusage. [Nurses] are sharing various PPE all the time. We think that is an easy way to transmit disease, especially COVID, amongst coworkers. We’ve had outbreaks on some of our floors. We’re trying to do everything we can to avoid that.
We knew this was going to happen, we knew there was going to be a second wave. And we don’t know what we even have—I’m a worker there, and I don’t know what they have in terms of PPE supplies. [Nurses] are only told: “We’re short on them, so that’s why we have to conserve them.” This puts us in jeopardy. Conserve them? What do we have to do, wear it a hundred times before it falls apart? The usage policy changes all the time, unit to unit. On our medical/surgical ICU floors, the nurses and staff’s access to N-95 and other PPE is greatly restricted. While I can get adequate equipment, it might have been previously used. But on our other floors, where they are taking care of positive COVID patients or suspected-positive patients, these nurses are going in and out of the rooms with a surgical mask and some eye protection. They need respirators.
SW: What is the genesis of this mask reuse policy? The number of cases is ticking up and up. With 150 nurses who reportedly either contracted COVID or needed to quarantine, how does management try to rationalize this?
MF: We just want a safe work environment and we have to be part of the discussion. That’s the dilemma. Right now, we’re just given emails to read or our manager comes around to tell us what a given policy is. We’ve been discouraged from using the N-95s and Albany Med has based that on Center for Disease Control [CDC] guidelines, which are very weak. Those guidelines changed with the pandemic because there has been a shortage of the N-95s. To deal with that, the CDC just decided that you can reuse them but their language is all over the place. The CDC says it’s okay to reuse them based on the manufacturer’s guidelines...but the manufacturer says you can’t reuse them. So then the CDC says it’s okay to reuse them up to five times. Albany Med’s policy is up to 20 times. We want a safe work environment and we don’t want to potentially bring COVID home or into our community. We’re not convinced we’re working in the safest way possible.
Why weren't they prepared? You’ll have to ask them. We raised it a number of times. Albany Med says it’s a management decision. They just created a new committee to deal with COVID now, finally, and they say there are nurses on it. But no floor nurses—there may be nurses on it but they haven’t worked bedside in twenty years. We’re not part of the discussion to figure this out and make it better there.
SW: Along with dismissing your concerns regarding inadequate PPE, what else did Albany Med’s last and final offer lack? What are the other outstanding issues at the bargaining table?
MF: We want more of a voice, for one. We also want better language regarding staffing. We have some agreement on the amount of nurses for each floor, per shift, but we want a stronger way of dealing with differences. Albany Med has agreed to mediation but not beyond that. And staffing is a big issue every day at the hospital. Management wants to be able to change our insurance and retirement yearly, regardless of what is in the contract. We are looking for better family health insurance. Our families are paying $550 a month in premiums on top of deductibles and other costs. It can be as high as $700 a month. We want a pay raise that’s guaranteed, not based on merit. They want it mostly based on merit. That’s where a lot of discrimination occurs because it’s up to the manager to decided what your wage is going to be for the next year. It’s okay that some of it is based on merit, but we want a bigger chunk of any wage increase to be guaranteed.
We’re really not that far apart on any of these issues. The amount of money they spent for the day of the strike and the three days afterwards was incredible. They could have settled this contract for less than what they spent on the strike. This is Albany Med just being the bully. We’ve been dealing with this for two and a half years. COVID really set us back in terms of our negotiations. We couldn’t have in person negotiations for nearly five months and they were suspended completely for three months. Working through that period was just awful, but it also really solidified us.
SW: You mentioned staffing as an issue at the bargaining table. At various rallies and on the picket line, I heard about the amount of turnover at Albany Med recently. What staffing-related changes are you pushing? Is the increased amount of turnover related to COVID, or is this something only exacerbated by the pandemic?
MF: The turnover at Albany Med has been significant ever since I started working there. It’s not just happening by chance. I think management’s policy, their economic plan, is to let nurses work for a short period of time and if they go, it’s fine, we’ll just hire more. Our fight is to make Albany Med more accountable to our nurses and the community and to make it a good place to work. We’re just trying to get a first contract. We know staffing needs change. We just want language in the contract so that we can address it when we run into problems. Turnover is part of their economic plan and that’s something we want to alter. We want nurses to be comfortable with staying, rather than looking at the wanted ads every day. It’s bad for our profession, and it’s bad for our community. We need experienced nurses at the bedside. When your biggest hospital in the area doesn’t care about that, our community suffers. These are people who could be buying houses in town.
SW: In the lead up to and after the strike, Albany Med management has ratcheted up its rhetoric. In a Facebook post the Capital District Area Labor Federation shared, you describe a campaign of retaliation and intimidation of pro-union nurses. Has this been happening in the background of negotiations over the full two years or more and caused negotiations to reach this climax?
MF: I don’t pay that much attention to the anti-union stuff. It’ll always be there, it’ll always be a part of the discussion anywhere you work nowadays. That’s the employer’s tool and sometimes working people have different approaches to how they deal with their situations. From the start, management tried to limit the discussions we were having with our coworkers. They wrote up nurses, called into the office, and gave written disciplines. Some nurses were basically pressured to leave. Albany Med has always been a bully. It’s my way, Mr. McKenna’s [Albany Med CEO] way, or leave. During the organizing drive, there was a fierce effort to encourage nurses to vote “No.” They threw everything at us, that’s part of the anti-union playbook. It didn’t work.
They continue with that type of approach in general. If we try to have these conversations about working conditions, we’re told we can’t talk about it here,like it’s some kind of secret. That’s the climate we deal with all the time. Every once in a while, there will be an email about how us pro-union nurses are “bullying” others, trying to get them to sign something. It goes on and on. They are trying to create an atmosphere where we’re considered trouble, stirring up things that aren’t real. But we maintain a majority of support and we’re confident we will get a contract. With the recent COVID numbers, they’ll probably say we can’t meet anymore. Coming out of the strike, they’re fuming. The strike was a fiasco for them. They’ll probably say we can’t negotiate for another period of time, if the numbers stay high. That’ll be hard, but nurses are pretty persistent.
SW: What support have the nurses received from the community in the lead-up to this strike and since?
MF: First, the community has to be very concerned about what’s going on at Albany Med. Two-thirds of Albany Med’s income is Medicare and Medicaid—with COVID, probably higher. Our tax dollars pay for this. They pay for these decisions being made by CEO McKenna. Management wants the status quo where they’re in charge, treating themselves and their friends very well but treating the rest of us as if we’re another expense in the ledger. Albany Med is a non-profit. They don’t pay taxes, they gobble up land. People see that and think, “wow, they should pay their fair way too.” So we’ve had local elected officials join us at previous informational pickets. [Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan] spoke at our Labor Day rally, as did a number of Common Council members and local State Assembly members and Senators. We’ve received a number of letters of support from the Albany Common Council, Albany County Legislature.
We’ve spoken with local small business owners. Some restaurants delivered food to our picket lines and put signs up in their windows. We have yard signs up across the region. Some of us went to Ilion, NY to support Remington Arms workers. Workers at Columbia Memorial Hospital [ed. note: Columbia Memorial is a recent Albany Medical Center system affiliate in Hudson, NY] are picketing and we’ll be joining them. They’re also in a contract fight right now. We’re talking with the media to get the word out. I think our community supports us for sure.
SW: Albany Medical Center is the giant of the region, not just in terms of the healthcare sector, but generally. It is this massive employer and it has grown substantially in just the past decade. It sets the area standard for the industry. It really has unbridled influence in the region. How does this figure into the contract fight?
MF: Our nurses definitely understand Albany Med and the importance it plays. 10,000 employees, 2,000 nurses, $1.2 billion operation—that precedes its mergers with Hudson [Columbia Memorial Hospital], Glens Falls [Hospital in Glens Falls], and Saratoga Hospital [in Saratoga Springs] and all the clinics opening up everywhere. Ahead of the strike, Albany Med management bought a full page ad in the newspaper and a lot of the nurses saw that. They understand this is not only important for ourselves but that it’s also part of a bigger picture. They pick up on it at the picket lines with the solidarity we get from local labor. We’re in this big fight and it’s hard, but we have to hang in there because of who we are up against. We’re fighting for our community, for our patients. We feel that deeply.
Sean Collins is a staffer with SEIU Local 200United in Upstate New York and a member of the Strikewave editorial collective. He also serves as the Treasurer for the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.