Federation of Nurses/UFT members employed by NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn won a significant victory in their long-running battle with the Sunset Park hospital over short staffing when an independent arbitrator on Dec. 1 sided with the union and ruled that the hospital must compensate nurses who work on short-staffed shifts.

For each shift that was understaffed in a four-month period in 2022, Arbitrator Howard Edelman ruled that for each missing nurse, the hospital must split the average salary of a nurse for a shift among the nurses who worked that shift.

The arbitrator’s ruling, said Mark Collins, the director of the UFT Grievance Department, is precedent-setting because it establishes a financial penalty for NYU Langone. “It’s incredibly important that the first decision not only found violations but provided a monetary remedy,” he said.

Collins said the hospital now has a strong incentive to maintain appropriate staffing levels, since it will no longer save money by short-staffing.

The 2022 contract between the Federation of Nurses/UFT and NYU Langone created a streamlined process for taking short-staffing complaints at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn to arbitration. Under that contract, a panel of three arbitrators was established to hear staffing-shortage cases once a month. In that same contract, the hospital also pledged to hire more nurses, but the hospital remains understaffed and short staffing continues to be commonplace.

The arbitrator found that NYU Langone was in violation of the collective bargaining agreement related to staffing on a medical/surgical unit, Unit 3500, on a significant number of days in a four-month period.

NYU Langone tried to argue that the contract language spelling out appropriate nurse-to-patient ratios was not binding. The arbitrator, however, agreed with the union that the “guidelines are not a wish list, or merely desirable, but mandatory,” said UFT Vice President Anne Goldman, the head of the Federation of Nurses/UFT.

The staffing ratios in the contract, she said, are a careful calculation of what is required to provide adequate patient care. “This decision is an amazing finding that the contract and the staffing needs are real and essential,” Goldman said. “They’re patient protection.”

New York State also issued new, stronger staffing regulations in July as a result of the state’s 2021 Safe Staffing for Quality Care law.

The Federation of Nurses/UFT has been fighting for years to enforce safe staffing ratios at the hospital. Data collected by the union show that NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn is routinely out of compliance with the 2022 contract and the 2021 state law, but with no financial penalty until now, the hospital has had no reason to address the nurses’ concerns.

The Federation of Nurses/UFT has been waging the battle on multiple fronts. Federation of Nurses/UFT members at the Brooklyn hospital have filed about 3,800 short-staffing incident reports in the last two years. And the nurses have lodged about 200 complaints with the state Department of Health, which is investigating.

The UFT is now waiting for rulings on other short-staffing cases before arbitrators, representing hundreds of other incidents.