by Candice Owley

The deadly effects of overtime

Flying home the other day, I sat next to a pilot for a commercial mail company. Eventually, our conversation turned to problems with overtime. He explained that he cannot be forced to work overtime and that there are limits on the number of hours in a day and a week that he can work. If he ends up working longer in a day because of weather or equipment problems, he is allowed additional hours for rest. All of these rules came about, he said, to create safer air travel.

I couldn't stop thinking about how clear it is to the general public that a tired pilot poses a danger to the safety of all. As air travelers, we know when we board an airplane that we are putting our lives in the hands of these professionals. We want to be assured that our trust is warranted. In health care facilities across the country every day, consumers place their trust in professional health care workers. Sadly, there are no rules that will ensure that these professionals have not been forced to work beyond a safe number of hours.

Excessive and forced overtime have become a plague on our health care system. Intellectually and intuitively, we know tired people make mistakes; the health care industry seems unwilling to admit this. Perhaps it is easier for the public to see the danger in air travel because one plane crash is such a dramatic sight involving the loss of lives of presumably healthy individuals. Somehow, it is more difficult to recognize the danger when the consumer is already ill and the loss of life is spread throughout a whole city or nation.

While less obvious to the outside world, the fatigue-related deaths and injuries occurring in the health care system are even more extensive and dramatic than those occurring in the airline industry. It is even more disturbing that the health care system is unwilling to admit the dangers.

In the airline industry, the public became involved and demanded a safer system. In the health care industry, the professionals must take the lead. The seriousness of this issue has led the AFT's health care division to make the end of mandatory overtime our top organizational priority. Our campaign begins with a survey in this issue of Healthwire. Please take a few moments to give us your thoughts on the extent and dangers of mandatory overtime.

At a local level, we will continue to push for strong contract language restricting or eliminating mandatory overtime. But that is not good enough because 80 percent of the health care work force is not covered by contracts. We must go further and work for passage of laws at both state and national levels to outlaw forced overtime for all health care workers.

In health care, mandatory overtime has become a factor driving nurses and other workers out of the system. It has led to new nursing graduates abandoning hospital work, which is creating an even more serious nursing shortage. Forced overtime is clearly bad for workers but so is low pay, inadequate insurance and poor pensions. The difference is that forced overtime is dangerous for our patients, and that is why it is our moral and legal responsibility to see it abolished.

A tired pilot is a danger to the public and so is a tired nurse.