This update is for our Livingston members. St. Barnabas is now starting a policy of staff nurses drawing stat bloodwork from the hours of 10pm-6am. We want the nurses to know that we are not in agreement with this new policy. The union views phlebotomy as a non-nursing function because it can be and is performed by phlebotomists and technicians currently. But the hospital ‘doing more with less’ and of course it falls back on the nurses. Nurses do perform venipunctures, BUT it is normally only in areas of nursing (ie. critical care, telemetry) where the nurse/patient ratios are 1:2 to 1:5.

We have reached out to management and expressed our concerns with this new policy including patient care with the acuity of patient assignments and staffing at night.  Management may still implement the policy.

As we promised you, we are pursuing all means at our disposal to get you a fair contract.  Therefore, we decided to go to mediation.  On Thursday, January 7, 2010, your negotiating team had an all day mediation session through state mediation. The mediator met with each side privately, and he shuttled back and forth, making every effort to try to bring the parties to a common ground.  Unfortunately, while we made constant movement, all of our efforts, and all of our movements, were met with the same answer:  NO.   

At the end of the day, Management did not, and would not, budge off of their proposal made in November, which is to give us the same as what the non-union employees got.  Not a nickel more.  Your last raise was 8/08.  And still no money at all for per diems.