The Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE) is the largest union of Registered Nurses and health care professionals in New Jersey. With more than 15,000 members, we are also the fastest growing health care union in the state, as our membership has grown almost four times in size since 1981.
HPAE members in our 20 locals include nurses, social workers, therapists, technicians, medical researchers, and other healthcare professionals. We work in hospitals, nursing homes, home care agencies, blood banks and university research facilities throughout New Jersey and the Philadelphia area.
Read “We Are Your HPAE”: A New Member Guide to learn more about HPAE.
In 1974, young nurses at Englewood Hospital lit the spark to begin building New Jersey’s largest union of healthcare workers. These nurses got together to discuss their difficult and demeaning working conditions, including being forced to rotate shifts, low pay and no recognition for education or experience. The nurses ultimately decided that the best chance they had of changing their workplace was to unionize. When they won their union election in September of 1974, they became the first private sector union of nurses in the State of New Jersey and subsequently achieved wins in their working conditions that were publicized statewide.
Their union was tested early, as Englewood Hospital’s management made repeated efforts to break their union; even stooping to such petty tactics as suspending the union president for refusing to wear a nurse’s cap!
Within a few short years, nurses and other healthcare workers in surrounding hospitals, such as Pascack Valley Hospital, Jersey Shore Medical Center, and Palisades Medical Center, noticed the difference it made to be in a union, and they reached out to the “Englewood Hospital Professional Nurses Association” for help in forming their own local unions. Eventually, they too voted to join, and, within 20 years, our small union of nurses had grown to ten times its original size as more and more healthcare workers joined us.
Now, 50 years later, we are 15,000 members strong, representing many more healthcare professionals, including social workers, respiratory therapists, lab workers, blood bank technicians, nursing assistants, even IT specialists in hospitals, long term care facilities, blood banks, labs, homecare agencies and research facilities. And we continue to grow.
We are the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, also known as HPAE, and we are the largest healthcare union in New Jersey. We started out small but grew into a powerhouse.
FIGHT AGAINST MANDATORY OVERTME:
• For years, nurses were forced to work extra shifts resulting in an exhausted and burnt-out workforce caring for patients who deserved better.
NEEDLESTICKS SAFETY:
- We fought for safer needle systems that decreased the chance of accidental needlesticks to both patients and nurses.
COMPETITIVE WAGES & BENEFTS:
- We fought for competitive wages, increasing recruitment and retention of workers in the healthcare workforce because we know that more staff equates to a better quality of care.
Because we fight for a safer workplace, our wins are wins for patients too.
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC:
- HPAE was also the loudest voice in New Jersey calling for safety in our hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, undeniably the most terrifying time in history for both patients and healthcare workers.
- We bargained enhanced safety language in our contracts and worked through our health and safety committees to develop plans for a safer work environment.
- HPAE also filed the largest number of OSHA complaints in our state when employers failed to keep workers safe and every HPAE complaint resulted in a citation and plan of correction from OSHA.
When healthcare workers are safe, patients are safe.
THE HPAE “CODE RED” CAMPAIGN:
- The campaign for Safe Staffing is an enduring current in HPAE’s history, animating many of our organizing and contract campaigns.
- And, so, the “Code Red” is focused on staffing appropriately in our hospitals.
- The wealth of research available to us shows that with lower patient assignments, the quality of care dramatically improves.
- Hospitals systems, however, are big businesses that will not easily follow the advice of researchers when it affects profit.
- HPAE and its locals are leading the way in this campaign, negotiating contracts with nurse-to-patient limits and pushing for legislation to mandate patient-to-staff ratios in hospitals.
