GOSHEN – Jane Sanok remembers feeling nervous going to work each day in the early weeks of the pandemic, when a frightening new virus was spreading quickly among vulnerable nursing home residents and the workers who care for them.
Her housekeeping job at the Valley View Center for Nursing Care and Rehabilitation now involved emptying contaminated linens and bags of disposable trays and plates from two red barrels that had been placed at the beds of each resident infected with COVID-19.
Loads of linens weighed as much as 20 pounds. Plastic bags would split open, spilling their contaminated contents. Sanok hustled in full protective gear, so hot in her gown in summer she would be drenched in sweat when her shift ended.
“It was just a continual cleaning, sanitizing,” recalled Sanok, a 34-year employee of the 360-bed, county-run nursing home, Orange County’s largest.
She herself caught COVID, then returned to Valley View after two weeks at home.
“We had people to take care of, and we just took that deep breath and got to work,” she said.
Nearly two years into the pandemic, Sanok and other nursing home workers who risked exposure each day and witnessed the virus’ devastating toll on the frail and elderly are in line to get hazard pay, a form of recognition many of their counterparts in hospitals got much earlier.
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At the end of this month, more than 2,600 employees of 36 privately owned nursing homes across the Hudson Valley are set to receive up to $1,500 per person under a contract deal negotiated with their union, the Service Employees International Union 1199. All worked for at least 90 days during the pandemic.
Next up in the region is likely to be Valley View, where most of the workers are county employees and represented by a different union. In their case, the payments would come not through contract talks but an expenditure by the county Legislature, which took up the idea in December and is expected to resume the discussion.
A serious wrinkle in that debate is the amount.
James O’Donnell, the lawmaker who broached the idea, proposed paying employees $5 for each day they worked at Valley View over 21 months, which could total as high as $2,000.
But for Sanok and some other employees who labored through a series of COVID-19 waves, comforting dying residents whose families couldn’t be there, $5 a day seems too low, almost an insult.
“We did what we had to do,” Sanok said. “The county should do that for us.”
The belated bonuses are being taken up as both hospitals and nursing homes are struggling to hire and retain nurses and aides, a problem that predated the pandemic in the case of nursing homes. With the recent COVID surge straining some upstate hospitals, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed this month that the state offer health care workers $3,000 bonuses if they stay in their jobs for at least a year.
Orange County is now offering sign-on bonuses at Valley View, which had 36 vacant nursing positions as of last month. The payments for new employees are up to $3,500 for registered nurses, $2,500 for licensed practical nurses and $1,500 for certified nursing assistants. Unionized county employees who steer a new worker to Valley View are eligible for a $500 referral fee.Â
The push for pandemic hazard pay for hospital workers emerged in 2020 after they had braved weeks of caring for COVID patients, who filled intensive care units and often died there.
The Montefiore system, which operates St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, offered its front-line workers $2,500 bonuses in May 2020. Garnet Health, which runs the former Orange Regional Medical Center and Catskill Regional Medical Center, soon went further, offering payments of $5,000, $3,500 and $2,500, depending on the level of exposure risk employees faced.
The Westchester Medical Center Network, which operates hospitals in Warwick, Port Jervis and Kingston, hasn’t offered hazard pay. In a recent statement to the Times Herald-Record, the network lauded its workers, noted that it hadn’t furloughed any, and said it retains staff with good salaries and benefits.
Before SEIU secured payments for its members in Hudson Valley nursing homes, some homes had given workers an array of lesser rewards such as $200 or Apple AirPods and other gifts, said Joe Chinea, a vice president for the union. The new contract entitles full-time employees to the full $1,500 and pro-rated amounts for part-timers.
Paving the way for county governments to award hazard pay to their employees, including those at Valley View, are the large sums of federal pandemic relief funds they got through the American Rescue Plan last year. One way they can use that money is to offer “premium pay” to essential workers.
Dutchess County, which got $57 million in relief funds, gave its workers $1,000 payments. Sullivan County, which got nearly $15 million, gave $500 payments to 713 of its workers, including 155 who work at the county-owned nursing home, the Care Center at Sunset Lake.
Orange County got $75 million through the American Rescue Plan. During a committee discussion last month, one lawmaker there argued that $5-a-day bonuses for Valley View workers would be too low, noting that the Civil Service Employees Association had proposed $10 a day for all county workers in that union.
“As much as I support the idea, I don’t think we’re going far enough,” said Legislator Laurie Tautel, a Highland Falls Democrat.
O’Donnell said he agreed but wanted to start with Valley View workers. “This gets the ball rolling,” he said.
The committee later voted down the proposal in what appeared to be a temporary action until more details about its potential cost were produced.
A CSEA spokeswoman declined to comment on the amount or the union’s pitch for all of its workers to lawmakers in October, saying only that the union appreciated O’Donnell’s “starting the conversation with his proposal.”
But a long statement on hazard pay circulating among Valley View employees suggests others share the view that $5 a day is too low. Addressed to county legislators, it describes the fear workers faced as the virus spread at Valley View, where 73 residents have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
“Five dollars a day?” the letter reads. “While you stayed home, stayed safe, we went to work for our residents. We smiled, we laughed, we engaged them as best we could while knowing they may not be there the next day.”
cmckenna@th-record.com