LBMC workers file lawsuit

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As the Herald reported last month, State Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg said that the hospital would likely file for bankruptcy as part of a plan to eliminate its debt, as merger talks with SNCH continue. Hospital officials, however, insist that such talk is premature, and that a business plan has yet to be finalized.

Berman said that the employees — mostly Long Beach residents, some of whom have worked for the hospital for more than 40 years — moved forward with the lawsuit after they learned about the potential bankruptcy. “That was our goal: to get our suit in before they filed for bankruptcy,” Pawlowski said.

She resigned in August and has since taken a teaching position at a nursing school because she could no longer wait for the hospital to reopen. She said she is owed three weeks of unused vacation time, or about $5,600. “Without this suit,” she said, “we feel that we would get nothing.”

LBMC spokeswoman Sharon Player said that a memorandum of understanding the hospital signed with South Nassau includes a nondisclosure agreement, which prevents the discussion of details of the negotiations.

“Long Beach Medical Center receives very limited revenue while continuing to incur the costs of maintaining its facilities,” Player said in a statement, adding that while other hospitals that were affected by the storm have received support through the Sandy Relief Act’s Social Services Block Grant and Community Services Block Grant, LBMC has received none.

“Consequently, the Medical Center does not currently have the financial means to pay all of its employees their accrued vacation time,” she said. “We certainly want to provide these funds to our former employees, who we know have been severely affected by the storm. We continue to explore mechanisms to help them.”

Of the approximately 1,200 employees who were working for LBMC when it closed, about 430 are still employed, more than half of them at the Komanoff Center for Geriatric and Rehabilitative Medicine and the rest at the hospital’s Family Care Center, Mental Health Clinic, Homecare Agency and other services that are now operating off-campus.

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