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Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Nurses rally outside VA hospitals to highlight staff cuts, vacancies
During a typical nursing shift at VA Medical Center San Diego, Andrea Johnson said she barely has time to catch her breath between room checks, family consults and patient requests. 'What happens if you cut housekeeping staff, and it falls to us to get rooms cleaned?' she asked. 'If dietary staff is cut, will nurses have to take on the responsibility to deliver meal trays? Who is going to handle scheduling to make sure a bed is available? 'All of those things affect our time and our ability to care for our veterans.' Johnson, a seven-year employee of VA, was one of dozens of department nurses rallying outside the California hospital Wednesday to protest an array of moves by President Donald Trump's administration that they say unnecessarily threatens the health of veterans and federal workers. House vets chairman backs VA staffing cuts but promises oversight The event, planned by the National Nurses Organizing Committee and National Nurses United, or NNU, followed similar protests in New York, Chicago, North Carolina and other sites in recent weeks. More are scheduled through the end of the month. 'We're not going to let them just bully the workers,' said Irma Westmoreland, an official at NNU and a VA nurse working in Georgia for the last 34 years. 'We're not going to let them do things that are illegal. We're not going to let them just fire people for no reason.' The rallies were originally conceived to protest looming staffing cuts across the department. VA Secretary Doug Collins has proposed trimming the workforce back to 2019 personnel levels, which would eliminate around 80,000 positions across the department. VA officials have emphasized that those cuts will not impact services or benefits and said positions to be eliminated will not be ones which directly work with veterans or family members. In a statement, VA Press Secretary Peter Kasperowicz dismissed the protests as fear-mongering and exaggeration. 'Positions that are critical to providing care to veterans — including nursing positions — will not be affected by efforts to make VA more efficient,' he said. 'VA's focus is on streamlining administrative functions, eliminating redundancies, and reducing managerial administration burdens without hurting veteran care.' But nurses like Johnson and Westmoreland — and Democratic lawmakers critical of the plans — insist worker cuts of that scale will inevitably hurt veterans' care, even if the effects are indirect. 'We're already spread way too thin,' said Beverly Simpson, a VA nurse who works in West Virginia. 'Any more cuts or responsibilities affects the quality of the health care that the veterans receive, and it makes so much more room for errors to occur.' Officials from NNU have lamented VA's nurse hiring practices for years, saying the department has not been aggressive enough in properly staffing hospitals to meet growing needs. Now, they said, the problem is getting even worse. Trump announced a federal hiring freeze earlier this year, but exempted some critical jobs like VA health care posts. However, NNU leaders have said the uncertainty over future job cuts has led many members to start seeking jobs elsewhere and is discouraging potential recruits. VA leaders dispute those claims. They said of the 91,000 nursing jobs in the VA system, about 8,800 are unfilled now — a vacancy rate lower than most other major medical systems. 'There is a nationwide shortage of nurses that makes recruiting and retention difficult across the health care sector,' Kasperowicz said. 'We continue to demonstrate the ability to attract nurses to VA, and we have hired more than 1,600 nurses in the first half of [fiscal] 2025.' He also challenged union officials to provide details of personnel shortages to VA management, so those problems can be addressed. Union officials said past complaints about the problems have gone unanswered. Further complicating the conflict are White House moves to scale back federal union protections. As those collective bargaining fights are being debated in court, the nurses' rallies have grown to include a coalition of other federal workers, local union representatives and several veterans advocacy groups. Department officials said final plans for VA jobs cuts are still being developed and reviewed, with an eye toward preventing problems in benefits and health care delivery. In a social media post just a few days after the first nurses rally, Collins said that too many critics 'view the VA as a federal jobs program' and are pushing instead to 'maintain a dysfunctional status quo' at the department. 'Our shared goal needs to be making things better for veterans rather than protecting the department's broken bureaucracy,' he said. But those assurances have not won over the nurses protesting outside VA locations. Officials said they will keep holding the events until their concerns are heard, and until a sensible plan for VA staffing levels is made public. 'When the unions band together with the community, there isn't anything we can't accomplish,' Westmoreland said. 'We're going to stop this. We're going to make sure that our VA is safe for our veterans.'
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Five years after the height of COVID, nurses are still fighting for their rights
Taylor Crittenden still feels 'righteous rage' when she thinks about her experiences at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crittenden, a nurse at a hospital in Texas, remembers staffing shortages, limitations on personal protective equipment like heavy-duty masks, and long hours as health facilities were being overrun with COVID patients. 'I was impacted by seeing all these people lose their lives,' Crittenden said. 'I was also feeling frustrated and quite mad. We just needed more help on the floor. We were the ones in the rooms having these conversations with patients. We were their emotional support and their physical support. And managers and supervisors and directors were nowhere in sight.' Two years later, Crittenden was among the hundreds of nurses at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin who voted to unionize. It was a snapshot of the worker power brewing within the health care industry — led in part by nurses, a workforce dominated by women — that received nearly daily public recognition of its crucial role in keeping people healthy and safe while grappling with realities like reduced resources, increasing burnout and health risks. Now, as nurses mark the five-year anniversary of the first wave of the pandemic, they're reflecting on their victories in securing protections but also new emerging challenges. Members of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation's largest union for registered nurses, spoke with The 19th about their ongoing push for worker protections. 'What we saw during COVID-19, which we still see at this moment, is a radicalization of this workforce — they have to fight not only for the public, but really to protect their very lives,' said Michelle Mahon, director of nursing practice for National Nurses United. It's difficult to estimate unionization numbers within the nursing industry, but there were nearly 500,000 hospital nurses represented by unions in 2019. Six years later, that number has jumped to nearly 590,000, according to survey data from the American Hospital Association and internal data shared by NNU. NNU added that among its membership, at least 10,000 nurses have unionized at more than two dozen health care facilities since March 2020. Kelly Coward, a nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, helped unionize her workplace in September 2020. It was considered North Carolina's first private sector hospital to unionize. The momentum to organize preceded the start of COVID, when HCA Healthcare, a major company with facilities around the country, bought the hospital in 2019. Staff and residents reported a decline in care, according to NNU, that was exacerbated by the pandemic. Coward said she and her colleagues faced long hours and diminished resources. She still remembers the chemical smell of the N95 masks that were sterilized and returned to her because there were not enough new ones. 'We did not have what we needed at the beginning of COVID, and during this time, when we're trying to figure COVID out, nurses are leaving. They're leaving the bedside,' Coward said. 'Some nurses retired early. Some nurses left us to go travel because they could make more money. So we were dealing with all of that, dealing with not enough supplies, not knowing what to do with these patients.' The union vote brought clarity to the nurses on how they could fight back. 'It's helped us in multiple ways to stand up to this huge corporation and say, 'That's not right. We're not going to do that,'' she said. The pandemic laid bare simmering tensions within the nursing workforce about frustrations over low pay, the length of work shifts, growing patient loads and general workplace violence — issues that NNU and others have been sounding the alarm on for years. 'They were being asked to work harder and longer hours, and move from patient to patient, without providing the kind of care that they wanted,' said Kate L. Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. 'Then you have COVID, where nurses were literally dying, and also dealing with much more acute conditions and understaffing.' Liz Wade has a distinct memory of this. The long-time nurse worked at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, when the pandemic began. Despite reports of health care workers getting sick, management at the time pointed to existing federal guidelines that allowed less protective masks. Several nurses who demanded N95 masks before they would treat a COVID patient were suspended. Wade, a nurse rep for the union, was at home when her colleagues called about the suspensions. She rushed to the hospital, where she said security attempted to stop her. Management eventually reinstated the nurses amid demands from the union. 'For me, it was an ultimate test of our union to mobilize and shut down the employer's narrative that we didn't need PPE,' Wade said. 'We did it swiftly, with no deviation from our goal — to provide every nurse at the bedside with the best PPE available.' In the years following the first wave of the pandemic, headlines began to emerge of new unionization efforts among nurses. In November 2022, nurses at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas, voted to unionize. Months later in early 2023, so did nurses at a nearby affiliated hospital. In late 2023, nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans voted to unionize, making them the first to unionize a private sector hospital in Louisiana. Jessa Lingel is associate professor of communication and director of the gender, sexuality and women's studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2022, she co-published research on the gendered assumptions of the nursing profession and its impact on unionization efforts. Lingel said the imagery of who is a union worker in America is changing. It is one led by women, though data shows men still make up more union members. 'For a long time, images of union members in this country have been dudes. It's been men — steel workers, dock workers, truck drivers — male-dominated professions,' she said. 'But with nurses, you see strategic unionization efforts that are tied to a woman's profession.' Lingel said that's important because any uptick in union membership in recent years has been tied to professions that have more women. That includes service workers within hotels and customer service posts. 'It makes me hopeful for an example of labor activism that is more explicitly feminist but also more attuned to issues of women, issues of people of color, issues of immigrants,' she said. Lingel's research was co-written with her sister, Kim Branciforte, a pediatric nurse in Oakland. When hospitals in the area tried at the height of the pandemic to temporarily roll back its minimum nurse-to-patient ratios — California is the only state with that staffing requirement — the union fought back. 'That was one way that the union really showed up. It was also really helpful to educate newer nurses who have only worked in California and don't know that the rest of the nation doesn't have this protection. When people say, 'Well, what do my dues get me?' I'm like, 'They got you these patient ratios,'' she said. Branciforte said it's only now, several years into nursing that she feels confident in her work, which includes part-time teaching. She said it's important that every nurse feels that gradual confidence, which also benefits patients. Without workplace protections, more nurses leave the workforce. That creates staffing shortages, less experienced nurses and worse patient care. 'Who do you want taking care of your child? Somebody who started two years ago, or somebody who's been doing this for 20 years?' she said. The union recognition wins have not come without challenges. In several instances, employers have stretched negotiations over initial contracts that can take more than a year. As a result, Crittenden's colleagues in Austin participated in a historic strike, and then a second, in 2023. Nurses also agreed to strike at Coward's hospital in the fall of 2024. The unions in Texas and North Carolina have since reached contract agreements with their employers. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken steps to weaken the labor movement both in private and public workplaces. In January, Trump fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, the independent federal agency that resolves labor disputes around the country. In March, a federal judge ruled the firing was unlawful, though the board member's job remains in question. Trump also fired the board's general counsel, another Biden appointee. Bronfenbrenner said private sector employees, including nurses, will need to learn how to advocate for themselves outside of the regular labor board process. That might mean getting their employers to voluntarily recognize future union shops and finding independent arbiters to hold elections. 'They have to make the cost of not recognizing the union greater than the cost of recognizing the union,' she said, adding that nurses remain widely popular. 'And if they have density in an industry, that's easier.' But the Trump administration is setting up new roadblocks for federal unions that organizers say could have a ripple effect on them. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would cancel a union contract with Transportation Security Administration workers who oversee passenger safety at airports. The move, which impacted at least 45,000 transportation security officers, is being challenged in court. Last week, Trump signed an executive order aimed at canceling collective bargaining rights from a larger swath of federal employees at more than 30 agencies, including nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs. At least one union representing federal workers has sued to challenge the executive order. All of this is playing out amid the backdrop of potential congressional budget cuts to Medicaid, a major health insurance program for low-income Americans. 'We just don't know the shape of that, but that inevitably is going to mean layoffs, because a lot of health care is funded by Medicaid,' Bronfenbrenner added. Despite the federal landscape for the labor movement, Branciforte is cautiously optimistic about the future of organizing. She said COVID was a wake-up for a lot of newer nurses to join or form unions, and the months and years ahead could crystallize that. 'The union has been the only effective tool that we have had to get significant change for our patients, for ourselves, and for our families,' she said. The post Five years after the height of COVID, nurses are still fighting for their rights appeared first on The 19th. News that represents you, in your inbox every weekday. Subscribe to our free, daily newsletter.
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
From Serbian immigrant who spoke no English to Idaho small-business success story
Nikola Prvulj is an American success story. The 30-year-old immigrant from Serbia didn't speak a lick of English when he came to the United States in 2015 on a basketball scholarship at Northwest Nazarene University. Today, he runs a million-dollar office cleaning business in the Treasure Valley with 24 employees serving 70 commercial properties totaling 1 million square feet. 'He's a very intelligent person, and he basically figured everything out and took on the language and has done really quite well,' Konya Weber, professor and associate dean of the NNU College of Business, told me in a phone interview. 'He's constantly thinking. He's constantly trying to improve things and change things and make things better, and to be very competitive in his business model.' Prvulj has a remarkable life story, born in 1994, quite possibly the worst time to be born in Belgrade, Serbia, in a country suffering economic and political hardship under the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic in a time when Serbia was heavily involved in the Yugoslav Wars involving Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prvulj described his childhood as being akin to the character Mowgli in 'The Jungle Book.' 'I grew up very freely,' he said. 'I grew up like a Mowgli. I felt like Mowgli in the middle of a jungle. The world was a jungle, and I just wanted to have fun. I had fun. Everything I did, I had a lot of fun.' Amid the harsh environment he grew up in, sports became a mainstay in his life. 'Sports was the biggest thing in my life, and because of sport, I actually had an opportunity to do something with my life,' he said. 'It taught me discipline, persistence and consistency, and hard work.' He played youth basketball and rose through the ranks to play for what would be considered the juniors in the United States, winning a Serbian national championship when he was a teenager. That led to a scholarship to play basketball at NNU, where he played for four seasons, from 2015-19. Prvulj could have just stuck to basketball and had a good time for four years. But he came to get an education, despite the fact that he couldn't speak English. He said he spent about a year-and-a-half relying on other Serbian friends who spoke better English than he before he learned English well enough to start learning on his own. He gravitated to NNU's business school, where he graduated with a double major in marketing and accounting. He earned GNAC all-academic honors twice for basketball and took 18 credits each semester his junior and senior years, according to a profile of Prvulj in the NNU alumni magazine. He also received the Gorden Olsen Outstanding Business Student award, voted by the business faculty as the senior business major most likely to succeed. The plaque hangs in his office today, one of his proudest accomplishments. 'He's very smart about thinking about how to make a system to improve his business,' NNU's Weber said. 'He reads a lot, and he's very focused on continually improving.' Weber served as Prvulj's academic adviser when he arrived on NNU's campus and for all four years. Her family still invites him over for holiday dinners. 'I would say he's definitely in the top 5% who really have had that entrepreneurial drive and really lived it out,' Weber said. 'He didn't just talk about, 'I want to start my own business.' He started one, he did it, and he continues to do it at a high level.' Not only that, Prvulj also worked as a janitor through college, which proved to be the foundation for starting his own cleaning business after graduating. So, really, he had three jobs: academics, athletics and cleaning. 'To me, that's very impressive and just remarkable,' Weber said. One of the things that impressed me during my conversations with Prvulj was how magnanimous he is about others for helping him along the way. He gave credit to his youth and junior basketball coaches, he thanked a litany of professors and coaches at NNU ('I wouldn't be here without them,' he said), and he raved about Berger, not only for taking a chance on him but for mentoring him in business. He lavishes praise on Paul Fleming of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce for helping him. Prvulj not only gives credit to all of his current Executive Cleaning employees, but to those who have left the company, as well. 'Each one of them, since I started forming the leadership team, they have a credit for what we are today,' Prvulj said. 'I want to say that we had some great people. They're not all with us now, but I think they gave their 120%. I couldn't ask for more, and I couldn't get more.' My first interview with Prvulj was at Slow By Slow coffee shop in downtown Boise, a location with significance because that's where he first met with local angel investor Dan Berger, and Executive Cleaning of Idaho was born. To start Executive Cleaning, Prvulj started cold-calling business leaders and investors who were part of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce. One of those people he talked to was Berger, a recent Boise transplant from New York City, where Berger founded Social Tables, which he sold to Cvent for $100 million in 2018. Berger moved to Boise shortly thereafter for a greater sense of community and belonging. 'He reached out to me on a weekday, and he called my cell, and I picked up, and he was like, 'Hello. My name is Nikola. I want investment,'' Berger recalled. 'I was like, all right, well, I got nothing to do, and this sounds interesting, so let's meet up. So we met up the next day.' Berger said he saw something in Prvulj and was impressed enough to fund the startup of Executive Cleaning. 'What I saw in him were the two qualities that I think every entrepreneur needs,' Berger said, 'which is work ethic — can they, will they bust their (butt)? — and coachability — will they listen to mentorship?' It wasn't always smooth sailing, and Prvulj tried to scale up too quickly in 2023 and almost ended up losing the business. But he listened to Berger's advice and righted the ship, so that by 2024, the business was back on solid footing with more than $1 million in revenue. Prvulj's long-term vision for Executive Cleaning includes using artificial intelligence to make the business more efficient and potentially franchising the business to expand its reach. Prvulj came to the U.S. on a student visa but has stayed here on asylum. But that means he's unable to travel outside the U.S. to see his 5-year-old son, Viktor, who was born in the U.S. but is back in Serbia with his mother. Their separation weighs on Prvulj. His eyes well with tears when he talks about Viktor. 'He is my biggest motivation for everything,' he said. 'I never experienced the amount of love than when he was born.' When I stopped by the Executive Cleaning offices in Garden City recently, Prvulj was talking to Viktor via video on his phone as Viktor was going to bed, something they do every night. Prvulj is in the process of applying for permission to continue staying in the U.S. under the International Entrepreneur Rule, which would allow him to travel in and out of the country so he can see Viktor. But the U.S. immigration system is broken. It's slow, backlogged and onerous, unnecessarily punishing people like Prvulj, someone who is contributing to the economy and the community. Prvulj in every sense is an American immigrant success story. As we were talking, it occurred to me that he hadn't said anything about sports, which he said has been a center of his life. What's he been doing since he stopped playing basketball for NNU? Nothing, it turns out, and that was becoming a problem, he realized. He needed that outlet and that balance in his life. 'I'm an athlete,' Prvulj said. 'Without that sport part, I wouldn't be able to function.' So he took up mixed martial arts, training in the evenings in Nampa and competing as an amateur. His record is 2-1. So MMA fighter by night, Executive Cleaning Idaho executive by day. When it comes to the business, Prvulj is a man obsessed, thinking of ways to grow the business, make it more efficient, more profitable — and a better place for its workers. 'I want to create an extraordinary workplace for local people,' Prvulj said. 'We offer great wages, we offer a lot of great benefits to people. I want to create an environment that local people will have a career. I want people to retire in Executive Cleaning and to serve Idaho, to serve the Treasure Valley.' Given where he's come from in just the past 10 years, I think it's a safe bet that he's going to be successful.
