In March, Bloomberg News reported that NYU Langone Medical Center had warned staffers in an email that speaking to the media without permission, “will be subject to disciplinary action, including termination.”

The email was sent after nurses around the country had spoken out to the media and on social media about a lack of masks, ventilators, and gowns in hospitals.

If a nurse in New York state had been terminated from NYU Langone or any other hospital for reporting on a lack of PPE, the state’s current whistleblower law would not have protected him or her.

“The problem with the current law is that it really doesn’t protect that many employees,” explained attorney Sarah Burger of the Burger Law Group and the New York State Chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association (NELANY).

A bill — A.5631A (Weinstein) / S.4396A (Ramos) —  sponsored by Assembly Ways & Means Chair Helene Weinstein and Senate Labor Chair Jessica Ramos would broaden protections in multiple ways, including for those workers who have a reasonable belief that their employer is harming employees or the public.

“A nurse would be protected for having reasonable knowledge on the issue and even though she might not know the exact count of masks in the hospital, for example, if she’s saying there’s not enough masks because not enough masks have been made available to her, or she hasn’t seen enough, she would be protected under the law,” said Sen. Jessica Ramos.

Current law will only protect an employee from retaliation if the complaint is 100 percent accurate.  

NELANY, which helped write the whistleblower bill, penned an op-ed describing the case of an engineer who warned that he and his co-workers were being exposed to excessive radiation at a nuclear reactor. The NY Court of Appeals upheld the employee’s termination because the employee could not prove the radiation levels actually were unlawfully high; his reasonable good faith belief was insufficient.

Burger says that is an unreasonable standard.

“An employee has to first prove an actual violation of law,” said Burger. “They have to be right about whatever it is that they’re saying.”

Contractors are also protected under the Weinstein/Ramos bill.

“This is especially important because a lot of our nurses that work at hospitals work for agencies,” said Burger.

Sen. Ramos says she is ready to push for a vote on the bill in the Senate as soon as the body reconvenes.