Nurses protest Manhattanville's staffing practices

Forty-two unionized nurses working at Manhattanville Health Care Center took to West 231st Street as part of a citywide protest for “safer staffing” on April 22, as negotiations for a new contract with management appeared poised to enter their eighth consecutive month.

The workers, led by 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Vice President Manuel Leon, 55, chanted their demands for expanded benefits, more employees and longer terms of employment at the facility, which would result in better care for residents, they said.

The Manhattanville employees were one contingent of the 18,000 caregivers who participated in the planned protest outside nearly 160 for-profit nursing homes across New York City, Long Island, Westchester, Rockland and Orange counties.

“The overarching issue is staffing,” Erin Malone, a spokeswoman for the union, explained in a phone interview. “Nursing homes employ a larger and larger percentage of workers through temp agencies, and one of the reasons they do this is to drop costs. But from the residents’ perspective, they’re dealing with new people each week who are not sure what their needs are.”

Manhattanville currently recruits about half of its 150 employees from temporary agencies including the Towne Agency, which is typical, Ms. Malone said. But because these employees are qualified to find higher paying positions at other nursing homes after completing a three-week training program at facilities like Manhattanville, turnover rates are high.

“There is always, always this turnover of staff,” said  Emmanuel Tetteh, 44, a licensed practical nurse at Manhattanville. “It affects the residents psychologically. Some of the workers coming in don’t even understand the language the residents are speaking.”

Sometimes that language is English, he said, but other times it consists of gestures and unspoken agreements — many elderly residents have lost the capacity to communicate verbally, and so rely on longtime staffers to remember the idiosyncrasies of their physical and mental health.