Max Gonano, a firefighter from Virginia Beach, was informed that he would need to work an additional 12 hours to cover for a staffing shortage as he was finishing up a 24-hour shift on Father’s Day. He worked for 36 hours straight and had missed the day with his 2- and 4-year-old children by the time he got off at 8 p.m.
Gonano and his coworkers have worked six times as many required overtime hours this year as they did prior to the pandemic, meaning that long shifts with little downtime and last-minute schedule changes have become the norm.
Workers claim that in order to make up for post-pandemic worker shortages, they are being forced to work longer overtime hours in everything from firehouses and police stations to hospitals and manufacturing plants. This has left them sleep deprived, rushing to take care of their children, and missing birthdays, holidays, and vacations. Even though working more hours can increase income, some employees claim it’s not worth the trade-off because they don’t see a solution to a problem that has been ongoing for several years.
According to Gonano, president of the Virginia Beach Professional Fire and EMS union, “it’s getting to that fever pitch moment.” It’s simply widespread. Individuals are sick of putting in so much overtime. Without a doubt, it’s lowering morale.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a shortage of workers in the economy. Many people have left the workforce to retire or take care of their children, and others have changed careers, frequently to ones that offer a better work-life balance or higher pay. Consequently, there are more open positions than there are workers who are either able or willing to fill them. There were 9.6 million job openings reported by employers in August, up 700,000 from July.
Higher demands have been placed on the employees who have stayed as a result, especially in the transportation, public safety, and health care sectors where minimum staffing requirements are common.
“They are missing flights for vacations; they are unable to attend children’s birthday parties. It affects their children’s mental health and their relationships with their significant others,” stated Nick Mutter, a Boston EMT and union secretary for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association. “Why aren’t my parents here to take me trick-or-treating or to do whatever they promised?” Try explaining to an eight-year-old the necessity of overtime.
Mutter said that eight Boston EMTs, some of whom were parents who had intended to take their children trick-or-treating that evening, were abruptly required to work the overnight shift this Halloween. According to Mutter, EMTs in the city have worked three times as many hours of required overtime so far this year as they did in 2016.
Employers argue that they can’t find enough people to cover the shifts, so they must require overtime, particularly in health and safety positions with minimum staffing requirements.
James Hooley, the chief of Boston’s Emergency Medical Services, expressed his dislike of having to depend on mandatory overtime, saying the department can only use it to meet required minimum staffing levels. “We definitely keep an eye on it and have been concerned about it.”
According to a statement from the Virginia Beach Fire Department, fire departments across the country have noticed a decline in interest in the field for a number of reasons, such as the low pay in comparison to other professions, the long hours needed, and the health risks involved.
However, a number of labor unions contend that rather than putting more of the burden on their current workforce, employers ought to be doing more to fill the ongoing gaps in employment, such as increasing wages or enhancing working conditions to draw in new hires. Labor unions claim that companies are sometimes utilizing overtime as a way to cut costs.
Understaffing has become aggressively normalized, according to Michelle Mahon, assistant director of nursing practice at National Nurses United. “This story about a nursing shortage, which is untrue, has been exploited by the hospital industry. A million registered nurses in this nation hold nursing licenses, but many do not practice due to understaffing and unfavorable working conditions.
Operating room nurse Nicholas Whitehead of Ascension Via Christi Hospital in Wichita, Kansas, said he frequently has to work up to sixteen hours nonstop. In order to cover staffing shortages in the operating room, Whitehead said he is frequently called back to work a second shift, which can extend until 6:30 a.m. the following day, after working his regular shift from 2:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. He only gets eight hours off work on some days before reporting for his next scheduled shift.
“You’re not able to perform to the level that would be safe or prudent for the patients if you’re getting that little, or sometimes no, sleep,” stated Whitehead. “It’s a lovely sentiment that companies would like to present nurses as heroes, but we’re also human and need to sleep. Additionally, fatigue causes mistakes, and in this field, mistakes can have negative consequences.
According to Whitehead, because the hospital hasn’t hired enough nurses, it has been using on-call duty—which was meant for emergencies or unforeseen events—to make up for ongoing staffing shortages in the operating room. Because not enough nurses were scheduled for the overnight shift to cover procedures that took longer than expected or got delayed during the day, he said he is usually called back into work twice a month.
In a statement, Ascension stated that its operating room staff is required to work an on-call rotation as part of their job duties. The purpose of the on-call duty is to address “emergent and other unscheduled surgical cases” that arise after hours. According to the statement, 10% to 15% of the nursing staff’s scheduled on-call time is spent working throughout the hospital system.
Although they had to work long hours during the pandemic, Whitehead and other nurses claim that even with the decline in Covid patients, their workload hasn’t decreased. Rather, they claim that in order to make up for the thousands of nurses who have left the field over the previous few years, they must continue at the pace of the pandemic.
A law that forbids employers from forcing nurses to work past their regularly scheduled hours—aside from emergencies or ongoing surgical procedures—was recently reinforced in New York. However, due to a shortage of personnel or beds in other areas of the hospital, Jen Burke, a nurse at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, said it has become common for her and her coworkers working in the cardiac catheterization lab to have their 12-hour shifts extended.
She stated that during a recent shift, nurses were required to work from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. in order to wait for beds to become available so they could move their patients after their procedures were completed. This meant that their only time off was eight hours before they had to report back for their next shift.
Burke claimed that management “just does not recognize that this is a problem.” “It’s simply not acceptable to tell someone that they actually have to stay for another two or three hours when you’ve already worked twelve hours.”
In a statement, the hospital stated that it “is committed to adhering to all applicable labor laws and regulations, including those pertaining to overtime,” and that it works to reduce the frequency with which nurses must extend their shifts.
According to hospital spokesman John Nelson, “Vassar Brothers Medical Center’s top priority is always patient safety and the delivery of high-quality care, which occasionally entails nurses extending their shifts when waiting for available beds or necessary staffing to ensure safe patient transfers.” “To avoid placing an excessive burden on our committed healthcare professionals, these occurrences are meticulously controlled to reduce their frequency and length.”
Employees claim they feel stuck in a never-ending cycle wherein they have to put in more overtime because of staffing shortages, which in turn drives out employees.
According to Larry Calderone, a Boston police officer and president of the Boston Patrolmen’s Association union, the police department has been short 500 officers for the past six years, and recruiting has become even more challenging in the wake of the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s death and the ensuing criticism of policing.
The police department has been short 500 officers for the past six years, according to Boston police officer and Boston Patrolmen’s Association union president Larry Calderone. Recruiting has also become more difficult in the wake of the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s death and the subsequent criticism of policing.
According to Calderone, “everyone worked nonstop through Covid, but it continued for 80 or 90 hours a week, every week.” The state of homelessness, the ongoing mental health crisis, the physical and sexual assaults that occur, and the police officers who are compelled to work there every day all continue. I’m not sure how to express the stress these officers are under when they observe this kind of behavior and the emotional damage it is causing to society.
Employees in a variety of industries claim there is no end in sight. According to Clark Ballew, a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division, which represents railroad track repair and inspection workers, the total number of freight railway workers has decreased by 30% since 2016 as a result of railway companies adopting a new staffing model that has left fewer workers to manage the same number of tracks and an increasing amount of cargo.
The freight railway operators’ association, the Association of American Railroads, said that in order to meet staffing needs and acknowledge workers’ demands for more flexible scheduling, its members have been hiring more recently. According to the group, BMWE union members worked 4.7 hours of overtime per week in 2022 as opposed to 4 hours in 2016.
Cory Ludwig, an Iowan machine operator who fixes railroad tracks, said that since September, he has been working 10- to 12-hour shifts that include some Saturdays and Sundays. He hasn’t taken a day off in 13 days of work. He has been forced to rely on friends and family to watch his five- and nine-year-old children due to the required Saturday work. He claimed that as he has watched the number of employees assigned to his crew decrease, so too have the demands for overtime.
“You go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and immediately return to work.” After a while, it really wears on you and can really break you down, according to Ludwig. “You get irritated and burnt out when there are fewer people trying to do the same amount of work, working long hours, and working multiple weeks in a row without one day off.”
One of the union’s members recently fell asleep at work after working for 22 hours straight. According to Ballew, this mistake could have endangered the lives of his coworkers but could have also been prevented had the worker taken a break. According to Ballew, one of the members faced disciplinary action after he declined to work during his allotted days off due to a family member’s medical concerns.
“That kind of stress builds up—the stress it puts on marriages, the stress of parenting, the stress of leaving things for your spouse to deal with, the stress of missing things,” Ballew said. “We have noticed a recent surge in suicides in the rail industry, and I can’t help but think there is a correlation there.”
