WHAT’S FAIR — PEF Division 225 Council Leader Dee Dodson talks to nurses Gloria Sutherland and Rose McGovern at SUNY Stony Brook. — Photo by Sherry Halbrook SUNY officials respond to PEF actions Fair-pay issue galvanizes RNs at SUNY Stony Brook By SHERRY HALBROOK The 1,300 PEF nurses at SUNY Stony Brook University Hospital and Health Sciences Center were stunned this past spring, when they suddenly became the lowest paid state nurses downstate. They were especially upset because the SUNY center prides itself on being Long island’s top treatment facility for acutely ill patients and it traditionally has paid more than other state and private hospitals in the area. Now, responding to PEF’s continuous pressure, local SUNY managers have recommended substantial improvements to the geographic pay plan that SUNY put in place this spring. “If the newest management proposal is approved, it will go a long way, but not quite far enough toward achieving fair pay for our nurses,” says PEF Executive Board Member Dee Dodson. “So, we must continue to press SUNY to ensure that none of our nurses are paid less than nurses at neighboring state facilities.” Top nurses getting less The pay issue became critical this past spring, when the state Department of Civil Service raised the geographic-pay for other state-employed nurses in the New York City and Long Island areas to a flat $12,871, regardless of experience. And these raises were retroactive to December for the Long Island nurses. Civil Service authorized increasing the geographic pay differential, hiring rates and shift pay for nursing titles in those areas to help state facilities compete for nurses in the tight labor market. But the SUNY trustees were already processing increases to geographic pay for the Stony Brook nurses, effective March 29, that turned out to be less than the Civil Service geographic for the majority of the nurses. SUNY hiked its geographic pay for its “teaching and research (T&R)” nurse 2s on a sliding scale ranging from $7,833 to $14,400 depending on their number of years of post-licensure experience in acute care. It also set up a sliding scale for T&R nurse 3s’ geographic pay. “Under this SUNY scheme, which is now in place, T&R nurse 2s at Stony Brook need at least 12 years of acute-care experience to get as much geographic pay as they could earn working as a nurse 2 at any other state facility downstate, regardless of experience,” says PEF Director of Contract Administration Robert Carrothers. And because Stony Brook made its T&R nurse geographics effective March 29, it also deprived its nurses of the additional retroactive pay that the other state nurses on Long Island were getting back to December. Don’t get mad, get movin’ Dodson, who is council leader of PEF Division 225 at Stony Brook, mobilized the nurses immediately through the stewards and member-mobilizer network. Quickly, the PEF division collected the signatures of nearly 800 angry nurses on petitions protesting the pay inequity. On June 13, they held meetings for members on all shifts to hear presentations by PEF staff and to question managers. A week later, when the SUNY trustees met at Suffolk County Community College, they were greeted by PEF nurses and staff protesting the wage disparity. The activists listened as Dodson addressed the trustees and described the injustice. “I thanked them for the geographic differentials they had authorized, but I explained why they are not competitive and will undermine our ability to recruit and retain the nurses we need,” Dodson says. For example, she says, SUNY Stony Brook only hired two or three of the nearly 100 nurses that graduated from its nursing school this year. Headed in right direction After PEF filed a grievance challenging SUNY’s right to control the geographic differential for SUNY nurses at the Long Island State Veterans’ Home and at non-acute-care services at Stony Brook, the state agreed they should receive the $12,871 differential that Civil Service approved. And now, as a result of PEF’s pressure, Stony Brook is asking the SUNY trustees to approve a higher geographic pay scale for the acute-care nurses in the hospital. “They are proposing to raise the geographic pay for the T&R nurse 2s in the hospital to amounts ranging from about $11,000 to $28,000 for those with at least 30 years of acute-care experience,” Carrothers says. “But even under this proposal, the T&R nurse 2s would need at least nine years of experience before they could exceed the flat $12,871 Civil Service rate,” he says. Dodson says the hospital is already losing many new nurses within a year or two after they complete the specialized training they receive after they are hired there. “We go through the expense and trouble to train them, and then they use that training and experience to go somewhere else, where the pay is better,” she says. The Communicator Home Page