National Nurses United

issued an executive order granting presumptive eligibility to nurses for COVID, but the coverage is temporary and has loopholes. There is also debate over whether governors have the authority to determine such policy, as happened in Illinois when Gov. Pritzker's emergency executive order to expand workers' comp to nurses and other frontline workers was blocked by a temporary restraining order that business groups sought. Minnesota nurses celebrated, however, when on April 7 they won passage of state legislation that says if nurses contract COVID-19, they are presumed to have gotten it at work and are automatically eligible for workers' comp. Within the Sutter Health system, nurses fought for and won presumptive eligibility for workers' comp if they test positive for COVID-19. Nurses also reported that hospitals hastily and inappropriately tried to cross train them to work in COVID units, ICUs, or higher- acuity units. Zenei Cortez, a veteran RN of more than 40 years who is an NNU and CNA/NNOC president and still works in the post anesthesia care unit at Kaiser South San Francisco, said that management tried to get PACU nurses like her to sign off on their own competency to take on independent ICU patient assignments with only four hours of unit orientation and about 20 minutes training on the ventilators. The PACU nurses put their collective foot down, saying no way. Now they are helper RNs for the ICU nurses. "Can you imagine?" said Cortez. "I haven't worked ICU since 1990." In Southern California, telemetry nurses at Community Hospital in San Bernardino all boycotted an in-service class because management wanted to float tele nurses to the ICU and force them to handle their own titration drips after just watching a six-hour video training. And, inconceivably, hospitals around the country have been calling off or even laying off nurses and other health care workers in the middle of the pandemic because their patient census for profit-making procedures is way down. Systems such as Palomar Health in San Diego County, HCA, Providence, and University of California are reducing positions and hours, and in the case of HCA's Regional Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., closing an entire labor and delivery unit. Some of these hospital corporations not only sit on billions in assets, but have received hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 bailout money; HCA, for example, collected $700 million and $4 billion in Medicare loans. "To make decisions on dollars only, to me, is irresponsible and does not reflect our mission, which is to take care of the community," said Sue Phillips, RN and chief nurse representative at Palomar, where the public health district laid off more than 200 nurses and health care workers. "We're responsible for a huge number of patients and they expect us to be here, ready to go." It's not that there's any shortage of work, since nurses could be reassigned to do any number of jobs to help fight COVID-19, such as staffing up units so that all COVID nurses can have helper nurses and a buddy to supervise donning and doffing of PPE, conducting contact tracing, or overseeing employee health and education. But these are functions that don't generate profits for hospitals, and show just how fundamentally misguided our nation's hospital systems' priorities are in the face of a public health crisis. * * * * nnu nurses have not been tolerating these injustices silently, but fighting back loudly at the unit level, facility level, through public protest actions, by speaking out in the media, lobbying their lawmakers, and organizing online. Ironically, the year 2020 had already been declared by the WHO as "the year of the nurse and midwife," and May Day, otherwise known as International Workers' Day, and Nurses Week, which always happens May 6 to 12, also fell right in the middle of the COVID crisis, so nurses took advantage of these occasions to amplify their message. Despite social distancing restrictions, nurses have managed to stage more than 400 actions inside and outside more than 160 facilities to demand airborne precaution PPE, to demand that the government use the Defense Production Act to manufacture enough PPE, and demand that OSHA enact an emergency temporary standard on infectious diseases. Nurses have grown incredibly creative; a new type of protest activity that grew out of COVID-19 is the caravan action, where nurses and community supporters decorate their cars and drive around the hospital to send their message to management. Nurses even held two iconic protests outside the White House, reading off the names of registered nurses who have died from COVID. In the second protest, nurses lined up 88 pairs of white shoes to symbolize each nurse who had passed. "We are here today to say that nurses are not being valued the way we should be by our employers and our government, who are failing to provide us safe workplaces and optimal protections as we care for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic," said Stephanie Sims, an RN at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. on May 7 in front of the White House. "Instead, we are dying." 20 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G A P R I L | M AY | J U N E 2 0 2 0 153,517 cases, 5,735 deaths in 144 countries MARCH 15 1,678 cases, 41 deaths in the United States MARCH 15 Seven Bay Area counties issue shelter-in-place orders MARCH 16 NNU launches public petition to Congress to protect nurses from COVID-19 MARCH 17 "The simple answer is they don't want to know. Tracking health care worker infections is not just important for looking at infection control within facilities, but it is one of the measures of success or failure of a response to this pandemic. If they knew the real numbers, someone might actually hold them accountable."

• Cover