Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Minnesota Nurse Strike
Dressed in all black, Mary Turner, the president of the Minnesota Nurses Association and an intensive care nurse at North Memorial Health, gave reporters the news earlier this month that after failing to reach a deal with hospital leaders at the bargaining table, the union would go ahead with a strike that it voted to authorize in August.
“This is a somber day,” she said. Citing a “crisis of retention” exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses have described a culture of burnout, over-scheduling, unfair compensation, and a lack of protections on the job.
The nurses voted for a three-day strike that lasted from September 12 through the morning of September 15, after weeks of unsuccessful negotiations. Overall, 15 Minnesota hospitals are involved. Allina, Children's, and Fairview were among the Twin Cities hospitals affected, along with HealthPartners' Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park and North Memorial Health in Robbinsdale. In Duluth, Essentia and St. Luke's hospital nurses also went picketing.
In addition to safe staffing levels, nurses are seeking more than 30 percent increases in compensation by the end of the three-year contract. Hospitals have offered just 10 percent to 12 percent, saying the union’s number is "unreasonable, unrealistic and unaffordable." Allina and Fairview both reported operating losses this year.
“Corporate healthcare policies in our hospitals have left nurses understaffed and overworked, while patients are overcharged, local hospitals and services are closed, and executives take home million-dollar paychecks,” said Chris Rubesch, an RN at Essentia in Duluth and first vice president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, in a statement. “Nurses have one priority in our hospitals, to take care of our patients, and we are determined to fight for fair contracts so nurses can stay at the bedside to provide the quality care our patients deserve.”
The Minnesota Nurses Association shared a 300 percent increase in reports of unsafe staffing levels on their shifts since 2014. Nurses with under a year of experience have been said to work lead shifts, and nurses have needed to oversee more patients at once.
During the week of the strike, the affected hospital systems employed travel nurses through agencies to sustain staffing, with the strike estimated to cost at least "tens of millions." Hospitals paid $7,000 to $12,000 per replacement nurse, in addition to expenses for travel, lodging, and training.
“If money was truly our only ambition in this whole endeavor, we would all be travel nurses right now,” Turner said. “You can't get care when the nurses aren't there.”
Negotiations for the overdue three-year contracts started in March, and nurses have been working without contracts in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports for nearly the entire summer.
“Nurses in Minnesota rank among the most highly compensated in the nation, regularly in the top ten among all the states,” a statement from multiple Twin Cities hospitals reads. “The average Minnesota nurse earns $80,960.”
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“The hospitals have seemingly focused on profits instead of joining together to develop strategies to help us provide the safest and best care that we can,” said Tracy Dietrich, a nurse at Children’s Minnesota. “We have dealt with furloughs, unit closures, lay-offs, extreme short staffing, and threats to our safety, and through all of this, we have still showed up to take care of patients.”
In 2016, Allina nurses went on two strikes that lasted for a total of 44 days for better health benefits. In 2010, hospital nurses in the Twin Cities went on strike for one day.
The number of healthcare workers in the U.S. has not recovered since the pandemic, down a total of 37,000 compared to February 2020.
The nurse strike in Minnesota could be a sign of others like it to come across the country. In Michigan, 4,000 nurses with the Michigan Nurses Association voted to authorize a strike, and a nurse strike in Wisconsin by nurses at UW Health was just narrowly avoided.
So what happens next? Nurses are returning to their jobs as of Thursday, with the hope that the strike made an impression on negotiations going forward. Multiple bargaining sessions were canceled because of the strike this week.
“We are the ones that are showing all the workers, all across America, how it is to fight and what it means to stand up for your contracts, but not only that,” Turner said on the last full day of the strike, “stand up for the working people of America.”
