National Nurses United

W hen marissa lee, a longtime regis- tered nurse at Osceola Regional Medical Center, starts describing the multitude of staffing and infection con- trol problems at her central Florida hospital amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the frustration and upset in her voice is clear. "I'm angry for my coworkers who do not have proper protective equipment unless maybe you go and buy your own," said Lee, a labor and delivery nurse and a California Nurses Associa- tion/National Nurses Organizing Committee board member as well as an NNU vice president. "I'm angry because of the low staffing and angry about them being floated to a unit they can't function in." As for Consuelo Vargas, an emergency room registered nurse at Stroger Hospital in Chicago, the rising number of sick patients and low staffing levels at her facility makes nurses feel like they are "working with one hand behind [their] back." "You just can't get it all done as you would in normal circum- stances," Vargas said. Lately, she said during a Nov. 23 online press conference that National Nurses United organized, her work has been so traumatizing that she is left feeling emotionless. "I reached a point where I was numb. I didn't feel tired. I didn't feel happy. I did- n't feel angry. I didn't feel frustrated. And I didn't feel sad. I literally felt nothing. And that is a scary place for a nurse to be." Lee and Vargas are among the nation's RNs who have been dubbed quintessential frontline workers in the fight against SARs- CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19. But nurses' daily work, under largely artificial crisis standards of care imposed by their money-driven employers, is taking the heaviest of tolls: The overwhelming majority of nurses are reporting deteriorat- ing mental and emotional health and feelings such as frustration, fear, and fatigue as they battle through staffing shortages, limited personal protective equipment (PPE), lack of proper infection con- trol measures, and skyrocketing, unrelenting numbers of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths. Nurses are witnessing patients die who could have been otherwise saved if they had proper staffing and supplies. Sometimes those patients are coworkers, and sometimes those patients are themselves. As of Dec. 18, National Nurses United recorded 277 nurse deaths nationwide, but that number is certainly an undercount since there is inadequate testing and no official data collected nationwide on the number of RN and health care worker deaths and infections. Of that 277, 14 have been NNU members. The untenable conditions nurses have been forced to work under, which existed well before Covid but have been dramatically exacer- bated by the pandemic, are causing moral distress and moral injury of RNs and is among the issues highlighted in "Deadly Shame: Redressing the Devaluation of Registered Nurse Labor Through Pandemic Equity," a white paper that National Nurses United released Dec. 8. The paper documents the experiences of nurses on the front lines and provides context for understanding how the nation's most trusted profession, publicly lauded as "heroes" during the pandemic, could be treated by the hospital industry as disposable at the same time. The paper explains how "care work" in our society, which is predominantly borne by women, is historically devalued and, sub- sequently, why nurses are also devalued. The 91-page paper traces the longstanding issue of the nation's corporate health care system treating nurses and other health care workers as expendable resources. That has resulted in exposing "how employers, lawmakers, and society at large have systemically devalued work that provides life-sustaining care of human beings and society," according to the paper. This devaluation can be seen not only in lower wages and how nurses have not been protected in their workplaces through provi- sion of optimal personal protective equipment (PPE) and occupational health and safety standards, but also in the lack of sup- ports they receive after Covid exposure or illness. For example, while a number of male-dominated professions, such as law enforcement or firefighters, enjoy automatic workers' compensation benefits for a variety of injuries and illnesses because it is presumed they suffered these on the job, almost no states offer the same benefit to nurses, a female-dominated profession, though nurses work with the same populations. While the paper suggests ways to mitigate hardships of the Covid-19 pandemic for nurses through policies and legislation, the ultimate vehicle for achieving justice and equity is through unionized collective action. "This paper validated what I have been feeling and experiencing because it explains and reconciles how our society calls us heroes, but in reality we are treated more like martyrs or sacrificial after- thoughts," said NNU President Zenei Cortez, RN. "Nurses are the backbone of the health care system, and if we are not protected, we will never get out of this Covid mess." T he current scenario is something like deja-vu for longtime nurses such as Deborah Burger, RN, an NNU president. The unwillingness to protect nurses and health care workers from infectious diseases, the devaluation of their lives and their work, is nothing new. "We have already been through SARS, H1N1, ebola, and other outbreaks," said Burger. "The guidance did not change and the protocol of 'Do no harm' has not changed. The precautions have not changed. Our employers refuse to follow these guidelines because it does cost money." The paper extensively details all the ways in which employers have failed to protect nurses: denying them airborne-precaution PPE, ration- ing PPE, forcing them to use so-called "decontaminated" PPE, requiring them to reuse PPE over multiple shifts or one mask over a 12-hour-plus shift though everybody knows that disposable PPE is intended for a sin- gle use only. Failing to test nurses, to contact trace and inform nurses of exposure, to follow basic infection control protocols—such as creating dedicated Covid units and zones within hospitals—were also other ways hospitals put nurses at unnecessary risk. In our profit-driven health industry, it's the proper role of govern- ment to step in, establish, and enforce health and safety standards for not only public health, but also for workers. The paper doc- uments how the federal government under the Trump administration, as well as state and local government bodies, have completely abdicated that duty. Instead, the highest-level and most respected public health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have provided cover for employers to put nurses at extreme risk by issuing extremely weak Covid guidance. The federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration still has no enforceable standard on infectious diseases on its books though National Nurses United and other organizations have been urging it to promulgate one since the beginning days of the pandemic. O C T O B E R | N O V E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0 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 N A T I O N A L N U R S E 15

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