NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — “We have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly,” Judy Danella, president of United Steelworkers Local 4-200, told the press after bosses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital got Superior Court Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey to issue a restraining order placing limits on striking nurses’ pickets Sept. 18.
The following day some 1,700 USW members, who have been on strike since Aug. 4, voted by 89% to continue their fight for safer nurse/patient ratios, higher pay and better conditions.
Hospital bosses say “we were blocking things,” Danella said, but “nobody’s been hurt. Every time there was an ambulance, pickets let the ambulance through.” The hospital’s claims are “very fabricated.”
On the picket line a few days earlier, nurse Ryan Siegel told the Militant hospital bosses “only offer guidelines for staffing levels. We want some concrete language — figures that are enforceable — like a maximum of two intensive care unit patients per nurse. And similar limits in other departments, depending on the acuity of the patient’s condition.”
The bosses’ latest offer “is no different to the one we’ve already rejected,” he said.
Before the contract vote the union held hourly meetings all through the day Sept. 17 at a church near the picket line.
“Now we can only picket with 15 in any one location,” Danella said Sept. 23. “We can chant, but not make any amplified noise, no megaphones. But nurses are staying strong because what we’re fighting for is right. It’s right for us, for patients, and the community.
“We’ve had a lot of support from nurses at Clara Maass and elsewhere, from the Communications Workers Union and from the AFL-CIO,” she said. To offer solidarity, contact USW Local 4-200 at https://usw4200.org.