[The longest active picket line in the US is in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where over 700 union nurses are entering their third
month on strike. Their chief demand: safe staffing for patients.]
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UNION NURSES IN MASSACHUSETTS ARE WAGING THE LONGEST CURRENT STRIKE
IN THE US  
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Nora De La Cour
May 11, 2021
Jacobin
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_ The longest active picket line in the US is in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where over 700 union nurses are entering their third
month on strike. Their chief demand: safe staffing for patients. _

Nurses on the picket line during a strike outside of Saint Vincent
Hospital on March 8, 2021, in Worcester, Massachusetts., Jessica
Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

 

After two months on the picket line, over seven hundred unionized
nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are
still out on strike. The walkout, which began on March 8, is the
longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts in decades and currently the
longest active picket line
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The nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA),
are demanding that the hospital improve staffing ratios so they can
adequately care for each patient.

In the year leading up to the strike, nurses at Saint Vincent filed
more than six hundred official “unsafe staffing” reports. A column
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in the _Worcester Telegram and Gazette_ recounted one of these
reports, wherein a nurse describes a shift in which she was assigned
to care for

five patients — four of whom needed continuous oxygen monitoring.
One of the patients, who also had COVID, needed peritoneal dialysis.
This patient required a wide range of monitoring and analysis with any
missed assessment possibly resulting in a sudden drop in blood
pressure and possible cardiac arrest. Another patient was having
multiple grand mal seizures — one after the other with each being
more dramatic than the last. Another patient was in acute respiratory
distress having multiple mucus plugs and high levels of secretions.

Nurses at the for-profit hospital say unsafe staffing levels have
caused problems like patient bed sores and UTIs, dangerously delayed
medication and treatment, and preventable injuries and deaths. Bill
Lahey, a member of the bargaining team, told
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Notes_
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about a man who watched his wife code and die from COVID-19 before any
staff became available to bring her to the ICU; the pulmonary and
critical care nurses who would normally make that transition had been
released for the day, per the hospital’s policy of “flexing” to
keep costs down.

“You have nurses who punch out at the end of a shift, and they’re
crying on the way home because they’re despondent about the care
they’ve been forced to give,” Marlena Pellegrino, co-chair of the
MNA bargaining unit and a Saint Vincent nurse for thirty-four years,
said in an interview with the _New Republic_
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According to the MNA, the hospital has lost more than one hundred
nurses in the past ten months to hospitals like nearby UMass Memorial
Medical Center that offer better staffing and working conditions.

Meanwhile, Saint Vincent’s parent company, Dallas-based Tenet
Healthcare, is doing just fine. It opted to use widespread furloughs
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and layoffs to “maximize [its] cash position” during the pandemic,
rather than spending the $2.8 billion it received in CARES Act relief.
Tenet, one of the nation’s largest health care systems, has been so
profitable in the past year that it plans to save $33 million in
interest by paying back nearly half a billion
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in debt that’s not due until 2025. The company currently holds about
$3 billion in cash — ten times what it boasted in 2019.

And Saint Vincent is one of Tenet’s most profitable hospitals. In
2019, it posted a profit margin of 14 percent, or $73 million, about
four times the state’s average for hospitals. On February 10 — the
same day MNA nurses at Saint Vincent voted overwhelmingly to authorize
a strike
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— Tenet announced annual profits of $414 million.

Saint Vincent’s staffing issues are emblematic of a much larger
problem
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with the United States’ profit-driven health care system: in recent
surveys of nurses in Massachusetts
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across the country
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majorities of respondents reported that understaffing makes hospitals
unsafe. A majority of Massachusetts nurses say conditions are
deteriorating.

Research [[link removed]] suggests that the
chances of in-patient death jump by 7 percent with each additional
patient a nurse is assigned to care for. Back in 2018, the MNA pushed
hard for Massachusetts to follow California
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in putting safe nurse-to-patient ratios
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into law. The hospital industry defeated that measure, reversing
initial public support
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with the help of a prominent Democratic-affiliated consulting firm.
California’s nurse staffing law, which has been in effect since
2004, has improved care outcomes
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for poor patients [[link removed]].

In the lead-up to the Massachusetts referendum, nursing economist and
former MNA president Judith Shindul-Rothschild argued
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that hospitals could “trim administrative fat” in order to free up
the funds to hire more nurses. Tenet’s CEO, Ronald Rittenmeyer,
earns about 452 times the median pay
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for Tenet workers. As of 2019, Rittenmeyer’s total compensation
package was over $24 million.

Before going out on strike, Saint Vincent nurses tried a range of more
conciliatory means to convince the hospital to address their concerns.
They sent emails to management, issued a petition, shared
gut-wrenching testimony at a bargaining session (they’ve been in
contract negotiations since 2019), gave Saint Vincent CEO Carolyn
Jackson a vote of “no confidence,” and engaged in extensive
informational picketing
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When these tactics proved fruitless, the nurses decided to strike —
the MNA’s first open-ended walkout since 2001 and Saint Vincent
nurses’ first since 2000. The latter action occurred when they were
freshly organized; it lasted forty-nine days and ended with a historic
win for the MNA in Ted Kennedy’s Senate office in Washington
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The current strike is now in its tenth week.

Tenet has shelled out massive amounts of money to break the strike,
with replacement nurses reportedly costing twice the rate of union
nurses. The hospital has installed high-tech surveillance towers to
monitor picket lines, and it’s paying Worcester police
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more than $30,000 daily for what it calls “security.” Management
is playing hardball, knowing that a strike victory could spur staffing
challenges at other facilities.

Negotiations have again come to an impasse. Tenet offered the nurses a
proposal on May Day that the union said “opens the door to
substantive discussion
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and lacks ”ironclad” staffing upgrades
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Hospital leadership rejected the union’s counteroffer and stepped
away from the bargaining table.

The outcome of the strike — the most high-profile action in a wave
of US labor
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struggles [[link removed]] related to hospital
staffing — will reverberate around the state and, potentially, the
country. Other health care workers are no doubt keeping their eyes on
Saint Vincent. Anyone who uses hospitals or long-term care facilities,
or has loved ones who do, should probably stay tuned as well.

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