PPE and Hazard Pay for Hartford HealthCare Employees
Hartford HealthCare Senior Executive Leadership
We are facing the worst crisis in modern American history. We are the elected leaders of the AFT-represented Hartford HealthCare unions and we have a simple demand: Respect collective bargaining and provide the workers on the front lines of this crisis with safe working conditions and hazard pay. We show up every day for our patients and to heal our communities in this time of crisis. We demand the following not just for our union-represented members but for all healthcare workers!
SAFE WORKING CONDITIONS: Safe patient care is the most important part of our job as healthcare workers. We work in healthcare to heal our communities, not to be a conduit for spreading a pandemic. It is unconscionable to send healthcare workers into a COVID designated hospital floor, wing, or room without providing us basic and adequate protections, so we don’t get sick or spread the virus. Unfortunately, this has been happening every day during this crisis. It must stop. Now. Every healthcare worker needs the proper PPE (and yes that means N95s) to do their job safely without having to risk their job by standing up to a manager to demand it. Protect us on the job so that we can protect our patients. Other hospitals across Connecticut are providing N95s to workers who are providing care to COVID patients. If they can do it, why can’t HHC? We require clear PPE guidelines, a new procedure mask every shift, and N95 respirators every time we see a COVID patient. No excuses.
HAZARD PAY: No one saw this coming. When we entered our professions,
we did not sign up to battle a pandemic without the necessary supplies
and protective equipment – yet we continue to go to work every day
because we care about our patients and our community. This risk must be
respected with Pandemic Hazard Pay. What we have learned so far in this pandemic is that healthcare workers are disproportionately infected by this virus. Between 10% and 20% of U.S. COVID cases are health care
workers. In recent days, we have seen grocery store clerks,
warehouse workers, and others all receive hazard pay for putting
themselves and their families’ safety at risk by going to work. Police
earn hazard-pay, soldiers earn combat-pay. If you want the right to call
our healthcare workers “heroes” then you need to do what is right and
pay them #PandemicHazardPay.
RESPECT COLLECTIVE BARGAINING: In this unprecedented moment, respect for collective bargaining means negotiating contract extensions and labor decisions with your workers and their representatives in good faith. It also means honoring wage increases in our contracts and tentative agreements in a fair way to everyone with retro-activity to the date of the Governor’s declaration of emergency on March 10, 2020. Our most courageous healthcare workers shouldn’t need to worry about being laid off and losing their paychecks. Hartford HealthCare must honor their union contracts and sit and negotiate alternatives to layoffs with the Union before making such drastic decisions. Respecting your workers right to collectively bargain is simply the right thing to do. We call on the leaders of Hartford HealthCare to do better.
Providing your workers with appropriate PPE and Hazard Pay is the right thing to do. The workers know it, the patients know it, and the public knows it. It’s simple, Hartford HealthCare, do the right thing. History will remember this moment and those who acted justly and honorably in the height of the pandemic. How do you want to be remembered?
Karen Ashlaw – President, Local 5052
Leigh Johnson, RN – President, Local 5041
Heather Howlett – President, Local 5099
Sherri Dayton, RN – President, Local 5149
John Brady, RN – Vice President, AFT Connecticut
Jan Hochadel – President, AFT Connecticut
HARTFORD HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATION OF PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEES
H.O.P.E
AFT CONNECTICUT
AFT, AFL-CIO
Sponsored by
To:
Hartford HealthCare Senior Executive Leadership
From:
[Your Name]
We are facing the worst crisis in modern American history. We are the elected leaders of the AFT-represented Hartford HealthCare unions and we have a simple demand: Respect collective bargaining and provide the workers on the front lines of this crisis with safe working conditions and hazard pay. We show up every day for our patients and to heal our communities in this time of crisis. We demand the following not just for our union-represented members but for all healthcare workers!