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spring 2009

Legislative Subcommittee Meets with Rep. McMahon

Federation of Nurses/UFT Chapter Leaders Nancy Barth-Miller and Renee Setteducato, from Staten Island University Hospital (SIUH) and Lutheran Medical Center (LMC), respectively, recently met with New York Congressman Michael McMahon to discuss an array of labor and health care issues. McMahon represents New York’s 13th District, including Staten Island and Brooklyn. Representatives from NYSNA, CSEA, SAG, and other Central Labor Council (CLC) affiliates were also present at the meeting.

“We spoke to Rep. McMahon about where our hearts lie and what’s important to us,” Setteducato said of the meeting. Items on the agenda included nurse-patient ratios, overcrowding in hospital emergency rooms, health benefits and health insurance security, and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Setteducato drove home the importance of making sure all Americans have access to health care. “Working and middle-class people need to be provided good insurance,” she said in comments after the meeting. “Otherwise, people end up using the ER as if it was the doctor’s office, and this drives up costs.”

Setteducato also spoke passionately about the importance of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the labor movement’s greatest effort to reform labor law since the 1930s. EFCA would allow workers to unionize using a majority sign-up process and would stiffen penalties against employers who illegally intimidate workers. Under current law, employers can manipulate the system to drag out the process and threaten and harass workers so that there is no meaningful election.

“I told him [Rep. McMahon] how important it is to give us our rights as working Americans – the right to decide if we want to be members of a union. Without our union we would have no future,” Setteducato said.

For her part, Miller described for the Congressman the trials and tribulations that nurses face on a daily basis and the special problems facing her borough of Staten Island. “I’m a working nurse so I’m in the trenches,” Miller said. “I see the day-to-day operations of the hospital.”

Miller’s greatest complaints as a working nurse? Low nurse-patient ratios and overcrowding in the emergency room, an especially severe problem on Staten Island, the only borough in New York without a city hospital. Miller described in painstaking detail the cost to patients – catheter infections, bed sores and general neglect – of having too few nurses in a hospital. “Patients fall out of bed,” she said. “They fall down in the hallways.” All of which, according to Miller, leads to longer hospital stays and rising health care costs.

As for Staten Island’s lack of a city-run hospital, Miller doesn’t mince words. “Emergency rooms in Staten Island hospitals are overburdened,” she said. “We absolutely need a public hospital.”