HPAE to Gov. Murphy: ‘Why are You Standing on the Sidelines?’
Taken from Insider NJ
By Mark Pizarro
October 11, 2022
At a rally this afternoon, HPAE members and labor allies railed against union busting by Rutgers for turning public union jobs over to a private corporation.
We are also calling on Rutgers to cease outsourcing union work, stop replacing union workers with nonunion workers, stop illegal subcontracting and privatizing public work,” HPAE President Debbie White, RN, told the crowd gathered CINJ at 195 Little Albany St, New Brunswick today. “Rutgers, stop union busting!”
Union workers fed up with Rutgers using its partnership with Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health for union busting—with devastating consequences for the university’s union-contracted workforces, including nurses at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ)— expressed their outrage at Rutgers’ campus in New Brunswick.
In a pattern other unions are noticing since the state university of New Jersey partnered with RWJBH, Rutgers has been transitioning union-contracted work to its private partner’s non-union workforce.
White said unions have repeatedly asked Rutgers not only to stop union-busting, but to also provide data showing they’re not doing so. The university has played games, dragged their feet and, ultimately, refused to provide the data, she added.
“We selected this location, CINJ, because here is where we have found some of the clearest evidence showing that Rutgers is handing over our union jobs to a private corporation,” White said. “Now, our members have identified recently-hired non-union RWJBH employees doing jobs their union colleagues once did.
HPAE is part of a coalition that includes other Rutgers labor unions, community organizations and student and faculty groups that have issues with the way that Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, behaves as a public institution and how it makes decisions that affect services in communities the coalitions care about and serve.