“Respect us, Protect us, Pay us!”
No matter what we look like or where we come from, everyone deserves to earn a living wage, affordable healthcare, and safe working conditions. We deserve a nursing home industry that values both its staff and residents while providing the highest quality of care. But wealthy nursing home owners are focusing on their profit margins when they should be more focused on supporting their staff. It’s time for wealthy nursing home owners to pay what they deserve to staff, who provide care day in and day out to the most vulnerable residents in our community. We demand strong contracts with living wages, affordable healthcare, and safe staffing.
Our community deserves the highest quality of patient care. As nursing home workers, we are responsible for the safety and well-being of the most vulnerable residents in our communities. Michigan families deserve to feel safe, confident and satisfied with the quality of care for their loved ones in any of our facilities. Nurses, CNAs, laundry, dietary, and housekeeping workers are all essential parts of ensuring that our residents get the highest quality of care. Taking care of our patients requires teamwork and everyone is equally important to get the job done.
We cannot care for our community alone. We need community leaders to respect, protect, and support our work by investing in: quality healthcare for patients; healthcare workers; and our community. We’re calling on our elected officials and other community leaders in our state to recognize the sacrifices we have made and fix broken policies that fail to respect and protect workers.
- Workers are struggling to make ends meet with inflation and rising costs. When the economy opened up again, the cost of living also surged. Nursing home workers who have endured the pandemic deserve a raise for our hard work and sacrifice. Offering higher wages is not only right but necessary for retaining staff in an increasingly competitive job market. Instead, wealthy nursing home owners are shortchanging workers by failing to pay what they deserve.
- Nursing home workers desperately need solutions to the staffing crisis. Low wages and challenging working conditions have led to a staffing crisis across the state in nearly every hospital. Nursing home owners need to invest in us by paying competitive wages.
- Nursing Home Workers need adequate paid time off and affordable health insurance. During the pandemic, workers persevered through mental and physical exhaustion, stress, and trauma to protect and care for our patients, but the toll of the past two years has pushed many of us to the limit. These have been some of the most challenging years of our lives and the pandemic isn’t over. Nursing home workers across Michigan are already worn thin as our state battles surge after surge.