This past May, hundreds of health professionals and union activists gathered in Jersey City’s Liberty State Park to show solidarity as nearly 7,000 health professionals bargained for fair contracts.

“The goal of our negotiations is to establish high standards in our hospitals to create safer working conditions not only for our members but for our patients,” said HPAE president and AFT vice president Ann Twomey. “Our collective voice gives us the ability to make changes to things we just can’t do alone.”

An enthusiastic crowd from across the state rallied in support of the campaign and called attention to an upcoming ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on whether nurses who act in a supervisory capacity from time to time are supervisors, and therefore ineligible for union protection. Getting contract language to protect nurses from the NLRB decision was a key provision for all HPAE One Voice contracts. With the strike deadline looming, eight of nine HPAE One Voice locals and their hospitals agreed to contracts that included provisions for retirement security, workplace safety, safe staffing and maintaining union rights for nurse supervisors. Englewood Hospital was the lone holdout; its 660 nurses went on strike to fight for their pensions and for safe staffing.

At the AFT’s national convention held in Boston in July, delegates voted unanimously to support the striking nurses. Delegates also overwhelmingly approved a resolution on nurse supervisor status that supports the rights of all nurses to be union members.

The strike was settled at the end of July, and the Englewood nurses have returned to work.

“Safe staffing, decent working conditions and retirement security are issues not just here in New Jersey but in every workplace all across this country,” said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, who attended the May rally. “The right of charge nurses and lead professionals to have a voice at work through their union isn’t just an issue in the healthcare industry.”