Photo credit: José A. Giralt
Nine dental assistants who said they were fired earlier this month by Union Community Health Center (Union) after they were forced to work in a COVID-19 hospital ward protested outside St. Barnabas Hospital on Tuesday, May 25, 2020 to have their jobs reinstated and to receive adequate compensation they say is still owed to them.
As reported last week by Norwood News, the assistants, who were transferred from Union to St. Barnabas Hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic and reassigned from their usual dental duties to care for COVID-19 patients, cancelled a previously scheduled protest last Friday when the parties agreed to negotiate a settlement at the last minute.
A spokesperson for the group’s union, 1199SEIU, said during a phone interview on Friday that, at that stage, the group was negotiating with the entities involved, and was pushing for the assistants to be reinstated in their original positions.
Yesterday’s rally was planned to highlight what the group said were unjust terminations, and a lack of transparency at both Union, and at St. Barnabas.
The dental assistants, members of Local 1199SEIU of United Healthcare Workers East, were told they were being transferred from Union at an earlier stage of the pandemic. They said they were then put on a call list, and told to report to St. Barnabas’ HR department.
Upon reporting for work at St. Barnabas in March, they were given daily assignments ranging from bathing, and recording the temperatures of COVID-19 patients, to staffing COVID emergency departments, and bagging the bodies of deceased patients.
Daniel Recuero, a dental assistant who had been working for six years in the dental section at Union, spoke to the media during the protest.
He said he and his colleagues worked with COVID-19 patients in parts of St. Barnabas Hospital that they weren’t trained for, nor were comfortable in, for about two and a half months.
“We weren’t there like now where [sic] COVID is dying out,” Recuero said. “We were there when COVID was at its top, at its peak and everybody, every floor you went to was COVID patients, and you had dead bodies that were COVID patients, that we were told to move [..] and things of this nature that we were never trained, or needed to be exposed”.
Photo credit: José A. Giralt
Recuero also said that the group was not adequately compensated for the hazards related to the work. “No, no! You were okay when you had us in there like mules, like chess pieces,” he said. “But now all of a sudden, when it’s time to pay up, nobody wants to pay up.”
While there is a specific dental clinic within St. Barnabas Hospital where the assistants expected to be placed, Recuero said it is separate from the main hospital building, and located toward the back.
When asked by a reporter who made the decision to transfer the group to St. Barnabas hospital, Recuero said he didn’t know because nobody from the management team at either Union or St. Barnabas was available to provide the group with any guidance on the matter.
“Nothing was brought up to us,” he said. “It was just ‘You go here, you go here, you go here’. We were like a pawn on a chessboard. Wherever you wanted to place us, that’s where we went, that’s it. We had no type of supervisor. We had no type of nothing – guidance, anything.”
Recuero said the group was representing nine dental assistants and four nurses who were unwilling to carry out the work asked of them, and who were terminated for what he said were the wrong reasons, saying they were sent home from work on May 8, and have not been paid since then.
During the protest, there were some cheers among the group, suggesting that they had made some headway with their negotiations. When asked about this, Recuero displayed a message on a tablet which appeared to confirm the group’s reinstatement. “Step two is to get this compensation pay,” he said.
“But that’s just one of the many battles still to be fought,” he added, referring to the presumed reinstatement. “We’ll still need to get our back pay, and we still need to get our compensation [sic] for being in the hospital, as hazard pay. They still haven’t called us on that yet. So, we have to work on that as well.”
In terms of the type of work the assistants expect to do on their return, Recuero said they would be unable to carry out their usual work because the dental clinic is still closed. “We still have to find out when they’re going to be reopened,” he said. “And then, upon that, then that’s when we can go back and perform in our regular job duties.”
Recuero said that St. Barnabas hospital and Union are apparently separate entities but share the same human resources department. He said that Karen Johnson, the head of the human resources department, was the person who had sent out a letter confirming that the group’s positions had been terminated.
“We got the first notice on May 18th that we were terminated, but it didn’t come from HR. It came from my own proper union that hit us up, and told us that we were terminated,” he said. “So, they unjustifiably just sent us home, and then told us ten days later we were terminated for no apparent reason.”
When asked by a reporter if he thought the situation was better at the hospital now, in terms of the pandemic, Recuero said, “Well, I don’t know what the situation is because I haven’t been at work, so I don’t know. All I know is that when I was there, it wasn’t good”.
Recuero said he didn’t know how many workers had been transferred between the two entities. “It was a lot because there’s still employees in the hospital working now that we’re trying to get out as well,” he said.
When contacted by Norwood News for comment about the protest, John Clarke from St. Barnabas Hospital said the dental assistants were all employees of Union Community Health Center.
Photo credit: José A. Giralt
“They all work for Union,” he said. “They were repurposed, I’m guessing, middle of March to work at St. Barnabas hospital, and a lot of their duties did involve working in some capacity with COVID patients.”
Clarke said that when the pandemic slowed down, and St. Barnabas no longer needed them, they sent them back to Union. “That’s the extent of it from our perspective,” he said. “I mean they’re not our employees. We didn’t terminate them because they don’t work for St. Barnabas.”
When asked if the assistants were employees under contract at Union, Clarke said, “Well, I don’t know about Union. You’ll have to talk to Union about the relationship with the dental assistants, but they’re not employees of St. Barnabas”.
Regarding whether or not the assistants received adequate PPE, and training on how to use PPE when dealing with COVID-19 patients at St. Barnabas, Clarke said, “Again, as far as I know, they used the same PPE that any health care worker would use, when dealing with COVID patients”.
Clarke said he assumed they did receive training on how to use PPE but he didn’t know for sure. “I’m assuming that anybody who works on the front line in our hospital, or any hospital was probably given instruction on how to use PPE, how to put masks on correctly, how to put gowns on, face shields, stuff like that,” he said.
“I’m assuming that. I don’t know for a fact. I find it extremely hard to believe they weren’t given instructions on how to wear PPE before they began working with COVID patients.”
Norwood News also contacted Union Community Health Center about the assistants’ concerns. They had no comment and referred us to 1199SEIU.
1199SEIU was contacted to clarify some of the points raised by the assistants, and, as of the time of publication, had not responded to our requests.
In March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed the centralization of hospital resources across all hospitals, both public and private, at least in terms of PPE and ventilators. The transfer of excess patients between hospitals was also ordered.
Norwood News contacted the State health department to see if the reason the assistants were transferred to St. Barnabas was perhaps on the instruction of the State.
As of the time of publication, we had not received a response to the question of whether transfers between hospitals involved staff as well as patients, and if they did, whether such transfers were between hospitals and health centers, or solely between hospitals.
As for the assistants, Recuero said they will continue their struggle to obtain what they regard as appropriate compensation for their work. “It was one reason – to fight and we fought, we represented but we still need to fight,” he said.
“We want our money. We want everything that’s coming to us, whether it’s backpay, whether it’s hazard pay, whether it’s compensation for what they did to us – something needs to be done.”
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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.
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