What’s Afflicting Nurses?
Nurses appear to have more clout lately, making hospitals more likely to meet the union demands than previously. What are some of the issues at the bottom of the strikes and the acquiescence?
In September, 8,200 nurses in four states went on strike, citing patient-to-nurse staffing levels and stagnant pay for health care workers as issues. About 80,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente were planning a seven-day strike in September before reaching an agreement, as were 650 nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. In the spring, 1,200 nurses and health care workers at Mercy Health’s St. Vincent Medical Center in Ohio engaged in a strike lasting 38 days to protest overtime policies and unsafe on-call policies.
Part of the group of 8,200 included 2,200 nurses at the University of Chicago Medical Center. They said that the center “chronically understaffs its nursing floors, nurses are forced to work overtime and don’t always have time to take bathroom or lunch breaks, and crucial supplies like infusion pumps, used to deliver nutrition or medication intravenously, are often in short supply or lacking altogether,” reported Jaimy Lee, health care news editor at LinkedIn .
The 4 million nurses in the U.S. want change. Because there are so many of them, while at the same time, a short supply in some markets, they may be winning some of their battles.
They are now using their influence and size — there are — to push for change. And in the current labor market, in which nurses are in short supply, they are largely winning those battles. While most health care strikes during the last decade have happened in California, Massachusetts and Minnesota, the strikes in 2018 and 2019 have involved seven states, including first-time nurse strikes in Arizona and Florida last month.
According to Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, “Executive pay is high, the role of private equity is growing and patient care seems to be at the bottom of the priority list. All those changes have led to massive frustration among nurses. We’re also in a moment of increased strikes and increased protests across the economy.”
Nurses seem to be especially incensed about the fact that profit-focused hospital systems give executives million-dollar pay packages, build expensive new administrative buildings and even have record-making margins at not-for-profit hospitals while nurses have to cope with a lack of lunch breaks, basic supplies and pay raises. In some cases, contracts have been under negotiation for months, leading nurses to conclude that they had to do something drastic to get the attention of their respective hospitals.
A key complaint has been staffing ratios. Several major health care systems in the nation have been forced to set acceptable ratios and hire more nurses. Another issue is the medical debt owed by nurses for treatment to their families and themselves at the very hospitals where they work. One hospital acknowledged sending an average of 13 nurses a year to collections for medical debt they accumulated there between 2014 and 2018.
Sadly, nurses’ strikes are costly. They increase in-patient mortality and readmission rates. Figuring out a way to keep nurses and the hospitals that employ them happy becomes increasingly critical.
