City, NYSNA Agree to $21M Payment To Settle Pension-Discrimination Suit (Free Article)

The de Blasio administration and the New York State Nurses Association July 18 reached a tentative settlement of a lawsuit alleging that city nurse positions were improperly denied “physically-taxing” status that would have permitted nurses and midwives to retire years earlier at full pension, under which the city will pay $20.8 million to roughly 1,665 nurses hired between 1965 and 2012.

Should the agreement be finalized—a meeting with affected employees and retirees to discuss the terms is set for mid-September—70 of the nurses would receive $99,000 as compensation for the five additional years they had to work because they were denied physically-taxing status that would have qualified them for full pensions at age 50. Another 25 would get $79,000 for working four years beyond when they could have retired, and 25 more would receive $59,000 for working three extra years.

Basis for Lesser Awards

The awards will drop off for the larger group covered by the lawsuit based on how many years they worked beyond age 50 after completing 25 years of service. In some cases, they will receive lesser awards because, although they worked past 50, they had not met the 25-year requirement at that age. The lowest payment will be $1,000 for those who worked less than one year after age 50 and had service time of 19 years or less.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn announced that as part of the deal, the city will pay attorney’s fees and an additional $100,000 to the four Nurses who initiated the Federal complaint.

Anne Bové, a longtime leader of NYSNA who retired last year but remains a member of its board of directors, said in a phone interview July 19 that she had mixed feelings about the settlement of a case she and the union initiated in 2004, when Michael Bloomberg was in his first term as Mayor.

“It’s not totally what we wanted to have,” she said. Given the delay in resolving the matter, she added, “To me, it’s anti-climactic. Women have the right to vote and they can run for office. But there’s no such thing as equal pay for equal work. What I see this as is the first step in that direction.”

Times Changed, Not Status

The settlement agreement noted that the city’s list of Physically Taxing Jobs was first issued in 1968 and included male-dominated positions including Emergency Medical Technician, Window Cleaner, Plumber and Foreman but refused to give that status to Registered Nurses and Midwives. Their exclusion continued even as attitudes about female-dominated occupations and their demands changed dramatically over the past half-century.

The Bloomberg administration denied applications by NYSNA for physically-taxing status in 2004, 2006 and 2008, prompting the union to file a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC determined that the city had discriminated by denying the two NYSNA titles physically-taxing status, and referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution.

Asked why she believed the former Mayor had resisted acknowledging the merits of the complaint, Ms. Bové said, “I think they thought there was gonna be a mass exodus” among nurses who had to work until they were either 55 or 57 to qualify for a full pension and would have been able to immediately retire if a change in status allowed them to leave at 50. “But I also think they thought this was gonna be a frivolous quest” to prove the physical rigors of the two jobs.

Those go beyond nurses sometimes having to lift patients who greatly outweigh them, she said, pointing to their frequent exposure to infectious diseases and “treatment modalities that are later proven to be hazardous to them.” And that doesn’t account for the effect that the mental stress of their jobs can have on them physically, she said.

‘A Chauvinistic Attitude’

“It’s a chauvinistic attitude to have,” she said of those who fail to recognize the physically demanding nature of the work done by nurses. In addition to some high-ranking city officials, Ms. Bové said, she’s heard that attitude expressed by “cops who are married to nurses who don’t think their job is that tough.”

And so while it was satisfying to have gotten the settlement that belatedly compensates union members for the additional years they had to work, Ms. Bové called it “a small win in the bigger picture.”

City Labor Commissioner Robert W. Linn said in a July 23 phone interview, "It was a long process and I'm happy we reached a settlement that works for everybody." 

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Richard P. Donoghue said in a statement, “City nurses and midwives care for sick and injured adults, juveniles and infants through long days and nights under difficult circumstances, and rightfully should be recognized as doing physically-taxing work.”

The settlement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office noted, did not require the city to admit wrongdoing of the sort the EEOC found in determining that it had engaged in “disparate-impact sex discrimination.”

It will not place the nurse and mid-wife titles in the physically-taxing category, the settlement noted, because this would have required all those now in retirement plans where that status applies to contribute nearly 2-percent more of their salaries, retroactively as well as in the future, toward the costs to the city that would be associated with their ability to retire earlier, including added hiring to be done.

Recent Hires Ineligible

Those who began working for the city beginning April 1, 2012, when Tier 6 of the state pension system took effect, belong to a retirement plan that does not offer physically-taxing status and therefore don’t have the right to retire at 50 and receive a full pension.

Those who are eligible for a portion of the settlement are persons in nurse or midwife titles who were employed by the city and/or NYC Health+Hospitals as of Oct. 4, 2016 and had reached 25 years of service before age 55 or 57, depending on which retirement plan they belonged to, and those who retired from those jobs under those plans between Jan. 1, 2006 and Oct. 4, 2016.

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