Midwives want a fair contract at North Central Bronx, Jacobi
Midwives at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and the North Central Bronx community hospital say they have been fighting for a new contract for far too long.
Their last signed contract expired in June 2023, and since then, the union has been in negotiations for an agreement that grants the midwives salaries at parity with the private sector and a method of dealing with serious understaffing issues.
The midwives are represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) . Their union contracts at Jacobi and the North Central Bronx are managed by the nonprofit Physician Affiliate Group of New York (PAGNY) .
Kinikia S. Reid, a midwife and union negotiating committee member, vented to the about the frustration of the ongoing negotiations. Although the union has been in bargaining talks with PAGNY, its representatives ultimately claim to be mere subcontractors to Jacobi and North Central Bronx; PAGNY claims they can only compensate the midwives based on the funds they are granted by the hospitals.
"That also is kind of a complexity to it," Reid said, "because we also have been asking for Jacobi or [North Central Bronx] to come to the table, [since] this is one of the major aspects of our contract that still has yet to be settled. But they are saying, 'Well, the fight is not with them, it's with [PAGNY],' but then [PAGNY tells] us 'They're not giving us anything to give you.'"
PAGNY did not reply to an request for a statement about the contract talks, but NYSNA claims the organization has already refused to address their safe staffing level concerns. The union also wants extra compensation for its members to cover the fact that midwives are on duty 24/7 –– they are on call for their patients, reachable and ready to respond if the labor of childbirth begins at any point during the day or night. NYSNA points to studies that show that nighttime workers often suffer adverse health factors . The midwives want extra compensation for their members who have to work these hours.
Despite having met five times over the course of the past year, NYSNA and PAGNY have yet to reach an agreement about a new contract. Reid said that at each of their meetings, PAGNY has been represented by a different negotiator, and each negotiator starts out their meetings seeking clarity on the role of the hospital's midwives — a fresh learning curve each time.
"We are now [going to be] on our sixth person that is the representative or the talking person for PAGNY," Reid said. "Every time we come back to the table, we are then describing once more to our employer what the midwives do, specifically, at our jobs, even though they're our employer and we sign off on these [job descriptions] every two years when we're re-credentialing. They still, for some reason, don't understand the different tasks that we perform and the workload that we carry at our places of work. We describe over and over again what we do to this new individual, and then the things that we accomplish or the tasks that we agree upon at one meeting are not passed on to the next person."
Reid said the union is currently waiting to hear back from PAGNY about when they will be able to schedule their next negotiation meeting. "We're now going to see if this will hold, but we're still waiting for this [next] meeting," she said. "We already know the last person is no longer with us and this will be the sixth person we've been negotiating with, so it's in bad faith; I feel like that's the definition of negotiating in bad faith."
