in New Brunswick 1700 nurses are on strike walking out of RWJ University Hospital early this morning the union nurses blaming Staffing levels and a lack of paid sick days as the key points in their failed negotiations with the hospital and as senior correspondent Brenda Flanagan reports they say they're fighting for the safety of themselves and their patients even though the hospital system which is an underwriter of NJ Spotlight news calls the move extreme that serves no one's best interest they walked off their jobs at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and on to picket lines across the street in New Brunswick for the first time in 17 years nurses here went on strike about 1700 of them demanding Better Staffing at the level one Trauma Center that sees three million patients a year we're tired we're burnt out we're going and going all day every day all ship you know it's not getting breaks because you're too busy to take a break when the icus there medical patients they require a lot of a lot of inch and a lot of care so when the icus are short staffed it's really profound it's bad it's bad it's impossible we're not being respected and when we're working unsafely motions veteran NICU nurse Linda Jenny says their attention is divided amongst too many tasks instead of focused solely on fragile babies one patient's mom complained and she's like can you keep your eyes on my baby so that's very hard for us to you know explain to the parents oh sorry we have way more roles than just taking care of your babies we are the nurses contract negotiations started in April in the face of a nationwide post-pandemic nursing shortage Jersey needs fourteen thousand more nurses and the hospitals hired 150 new nurses since 2022. the problem we have in health care right now is that we have a crisis a staffing crisis is a health care crisis the hospitals made three contract offers and says it's willing to go to arbitration in a statement it said that these nurses are the highest paid in New Jersey and that they work at a facility that's among the highest staffed in the state we're deeply disappointed that the unions decided to take this Extreme Action the hospital stated adding its latest offer addressed Staffing concerns and provides a twenty dollar an hour bonus for nurses should the hospital fall below agreed upon standards the union United Steel Workers for 200 voted down the first two offers and hasn't replied to the third one so that President Judy Donella the third proposal kind of nears the second one there was a little bit of a change but it mirrors the second one so that's why we had multiple membership meetings the members did not want to vote on it again the unions looking for Staffing standards similar to Deals recently negotiated by nurses at New York's Mount Sinai and Montefiore our wjs offered a 15.6 percent raise over three years but its last Staffing offer also imposes a penalty if nurses call out sick that's a non-starter getting the local union leadership together to have a conversation about it and kind of plot out our strategy for the next couple of days here while nurses pick it the hospital's continuing patient care without interruption not with medical students but with replacement nurses I know people call them scats and don't like them but they're going to allow us to do what we need to do and they're going to have to do what they have to do no word on when negotiations will resume in New Brunswick I'm Brenda Flanagan NJ Spotlight news