OUR MEMBERS
More than Simply Showing New Staff Where the Bathroom Is… League contract wins Preceptor Pay for more members.
10
November/December 2021
Every employee expects a grace period when they first start a new job. No one expects that a new employee should be operating with the same speed and precision as someone who has worked in an institution for 30 years. For police officers and fire fighters, it is widely accepted that the rookies will partner up with a more experienced hand to avoid making life-threatening mistakes in their first days and weeks on the job. “What people often forget is that many healthcare jobs involve making split-second decisions that can have life-or-death consequences, too,” said Tina Brady, an 1199 Licensed Mental Health Counsellor at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Queens. How can a recent recruit be brought up to speed in a healthcare setting? On-boarding videos produced by the HR team are fine, but the real work of showing them the ropes always ends up falling to the more experienced members on their team. For many years, RNs have been
doing this work to support new members coming into their unit and receiving a differential known as “Preceptor Pay.” In 2018, during the previous contract negotiations the Union settled with the League of Voluntary Hospitals and Homes, the Union negotiated an expansion of that differential to cover Surgical Techs. This September when the latest League contract was settled, the union won a further expansion of Preceptor Pay for dozens of other professional and technical titles, who will now receive a $2/hour differential for training a new co-worker. As healthcare technology improves, the machines used to diagnose and treat patients are becoming both more complicated and more precise. This makes on-the-job training more important than ever before. Adnan Isa, who joined 1199SEIU fifteen years ago as a Physician Assistant at Beth Israel, says: “Hospitals aren’t the safest places: There is so much going on, and when
