Walkout by Filipino Nurses Results in Indictment

In April of 2005 a group of 27 Filipino nurses, who were recruited for jobs in this country by a US agency, resigned en masse from the New York nursing home that employed them. In October of 2007, as a result of their actions, 11 of them were indicted on criminal charges of professional misconduct and patient endangerment.

The nurses contend that the terms of the contracts they signed before arriving in the US were not honored. They found they would be working in a nursing home other than the one specified in their contracts. Initially, some were made to work as clerks at half the salary they were to receive in RN positions. They accuse the nursing home of failing to pay overtime and differential pay, providing insufficient training for their job responsibilities and assigning each nurse more patients than could be safely cared for.

The walkout incited a spate of criticism from other nurses who said that nurses should never walk out on their patients. The uproar from nurses who oppose the indictment has been even louder. Please understand, the nurses who resigned did not do so in the middle of their shifts. They did not leave patients with no one to care for them. They did leave the nursing home short handed but they had been voicing their complaints over a period of several months without appreciable response from management.

Management was aware of trouble brewing, so the resignations could not have been a complete surprise. It is likely that management assumed the nurses would never have the nerve, gumption, or whatever, to walk away.

So, should the nurses have stayed on board, working under what amounted to slavemaster rule? Certainly not. The agency and the nursing home owner were bullies, exercising undue power and control over a vulnerable group of nurses.

The American Nurses Association and the New York State Nurses Association are standing in defense of the Filipino nurses. They are vocal in their condemnation of the exploitation of immigrant RNs by unscrupulous US employers and, as a deterrent, are calling for better enforcement of immigrant worker laws.

I certainly don’t fault the nurses for doing what they had to do. They were desperate and desperate people do desperate things.