NewYork-Presbyterian, New York City's largest private health system, is fighting two separate legal battles involving the state's largest nurses' union, the New York State Nurses Association.
One dispute arises from a May arbitration decision on safe staffing, awarding more than $270,000 to nurses in the cardio-thoracic ICU at New York City-based Columbia University Medical Center.
In late July, the health system filed a petition in federal court seeking to overturn the arbitration decision.
The petition, accessed by Becker's, argues that the hospital made "good faith efforts to hire and otherwise obtain additional staff to meet the staffing grid and evidence of the obstacles that it faced that arose out of market conditions for nursing staff in the area." It also argues that the award is "punitive" and was not available under the collective bargaining agreement between the parties.
The union argues that the agreement permitted such a remedy and that the hospital filed the petition to avoid safe staffing.
The NYSNA finalized its last contract for about 4,000 nurses on Dec. 31, 2022. The union has since faced arbitration over safe staffing issues twice: first in December 2023 and again in May, with the latter still being litigated.
"Our first priority is always safe staffing and ensuring patient safety," a union spokesperson told Becker's. "We do that through contractual enforcement, including arbitration, and also through New York state law."
NewYork-Presbyterian declined to comment on the case.
The second dispute arises from the 2020 termination of Rosamaria Tyo, a nurse and unionizer at Hudson Valley Hospital in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y.
In June, the hospital filed an appeal to the Supreme Court after losing before three tribunals, according to The New York Times.
The hospital said it fired Ms. Tyo for walking out of a surgery to attend a union meeting.
"Tyo excused herself from the operating room, without permission or coverage, leaving her orientee unsupervised, in order to attend a gathering of union representatives and employees who were going to engage the chief nursing officer in an unscheduled meeting to lobby her to attend contract negotiations between the union and the hospital to advocate for their interests," NewYork-Presbyterian's lawyers wrote in their Supreme Court petition.
The lead surgeon in the operating room that day recommended reinstating Ms. Tyo, according to the Times. The National Labor Relations board also upheld a decision by an administrative law judge, concluding that the hospital wrongfully fired Ms. Tyo for engaging in union activity protected under federal law. The board ordered the hospital to offer Ms. Tyo full reinstatement and pay for loss of earnings and other benefits, a determination upheld last year by a federal appeals court in New York.
Lawyers for NewYork-Presbyterian have argued that those who did not side with them acted "to literally 'play doctor' (or, at the very least, play circulating nurse) by assuming that [they] could run an OR better than the medical professionals charged with doing so."
NewYork-Presbyterian declined to comment on that case as well. Through a union spokesperson, Ms. Tyo declined an interview request from the Times.
The NLRB has waived its right to file a response to the petition in this case, and the Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will hear the case.
Meanwhile, Pat Kane, executive director of the NYSNA, told the Times, "That Presbyterian is willing to take this all the way to the Supreme Court has a really chilling effect on the workforce."