As patient advocates, nurses are increasingly concerned that mandatory overtime is detrimental to the quality of care being provided. Health care employers have only themselves to blame. After a decade of cost cutting, merger mania, and privatization, health care employers have created terrible working conditions that are driving nurses and other health care workers out of the health care industry. Those who remain are working in conditions of chronic understaffing, frequent forced overtime, and lack of supervisory and other support.
Airline crews have limits on their work hours to protect the public's safety, as do truckers.
It is time to bring similar protections to both patients and the workers who care for them in the health care industry. Regular, predictable hours are safer, and allow health care workers to rest and have time with their families. A union contract can stop an employer from requiring excessive time on the job. Eliminating mandatory overtime has become a top priority in contract negotiations across the country. Mandatory overtime was a major factor in bitter, protracted strikes by nurses in several states in the last few years, notably in New York, California, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and Michigan.