Dive Brief:
- More than 15,000 nurses represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association are bargaining for new contracts at 15 facilities, and launching an advertising campaign to inform the public about the profits reaped by nonprofit hospitals.
- The nurses delivered opening offers to hospital executives on March 15. Negotiations will begin in the next few weeks before the first of the contracts start to expire on May 31, according to the MNA.
- "Our healthcare system is in critical condition. The profit-first policies of hospital CEOs have created a staffing and retention crisis, pushing nurses away from the bedside and putting the bottom line ahead of patient care," Mary Turner, an ICU nurse at North Memorial Hospital and president of the MNA, said in a release.
Dive Insight:
After two years of working on the front lines of COVID-19, healthcare workers and the unions representing them are continuing to press for better working conditions and wages in new contracts as collective bargaining agreements expire.
Current shortages and widespread issues recruiting and retaining staff are a central concern for hospitals, and could lend nurses more leverage in negotiations.
This year, many labor deals between hospitals and unions representing healthcare workers will expire, posing the risk of more action including strikes if the sides can't agree on new terms, a Bloomberg Law analysis of labor agreements found.
The nurses in Minnesota are pushing for proposals to ensure adequate staffing levels and fair compensation and benefits, which they say will help retain more nurses, according to the union.
They're also highlighting the nonprofit status of their hospitals with an advertising campaign in a bid to "put patient care before profits," according to the union.
Only two hospitals in Minnesota are for-profit, while the rest are nonprofit or community-owned, according to the state’s hospital association.
The union is arguing the nonprofit hospitals operate almost the same as for-profits with "patients overcharged by hospital executives trying to boost their bottom lines," the union said.
"Hospitals are not providing nurses at the bedside the staff levels or support they need," and the pandemic has exacerbated the issue, the release said.
Alongside measures in new contracts, nurses are also advocating for state legislation around staffing. They want the "Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act" passed, which would require hospitals to create nurse staffing committees. Those committees would decide the maximum number of patients a nurse can care for, effectively establishing nurse-to-patient ratios.
While no major strikes among healthcare workers have occurred yet this year, several happened in 2021 and in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.
Some major strikes last year included one among 800 nurses at a Massachusetts hospital that lasted nearly 10 months, and another among 2,000 nurses in Buffalo, New York, that lasted 40 days.
Also, a planned strike among tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente members across Southern California was narrowly averted in December.
Those disputes centered around safer staffing measures, including nurse-to-patient ratios, stronger workplace safety protections and better wages to recruit and retain staff.
In Minnesota, contracts are expiring at 15 hospitals: Abbott Northwestern Hospital, two children’s hospitals, two Essentia hospitals, two M Health hospitals, two HealthEast hospitals, Mercy Hospital, Methodist Hospital, North Memorial Health Care, St. Luke’s Hospital, United Hospital and Unity Hospital, according to the union.