Nurses in Albany, NY reached a settlement in a class action case with Northeast Health, a network which has seven locations throughout the region and provides care for approximately 175,000 people each year. The lawsuit contends that Albany-area hospitals violated federal antitrust law by sharing confidential wage data and conspiring to depress wages by allegedly agreeing not to compete for the registered nurses.

The $1.25 million deal is the first settlement of five national lawsuits aimed at stopping hospitals from conspiring to depress nurse wages, and similar class-action lawsuits are moving forward in Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, and San Antonio. This class action lawsuit was filed in 2006 on behalf of thousands of direct-care nurses who were employed by Northeast Health between June 20, 2002 and June 20, 2006 and ultimately seeks to recover three times the amount that nurses in the class were underpaid.

This landmark legal settlement comes at a time when there is already an intense shortage of bedside nurses in the Albany area and throughout the country. According to a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, there is a shortage of more than 13,000 nurses in New York State alone and over 1.2 million nursing positions will need to be filled nationally over the next 5 years. About one in five newly licensed nurses quit within a year, according to one national study, and IWPR's report shows that the nursing shortage is due in part to artificially low wages caused by collusion amongst hospital employers in a given region.

Nurses hailed the settlement as an important step towards ensuring fair compensation for their profession and helping to solve the nurse shortage crisis, thereby improving quality of care for patients. "This is a breakthrough not only for nurses, but for the people we care for every day. For too long, hospitals cut corners when it came to valuing the hard work of nurses. Our hope is that this is the first step towards making sure that hospitals invest in the kind of quality care that patients deserve," said Cathy Glasson, RN, of the Nurse Alliance of SEIU.