Labor & Employment Law

12,000 Minnesota Nurses Give Strike Notice

By James Parks

Some 12,000 nurses in the Twin Cities could be out on strike soon after the July 4 holiday. Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) filed notice June 25 they will strike if there is no contract settlement by July 6 in contract talks with 14 hospitals.

The nurses are pushing management to include patient-staff ratios in hospital contracts. Currently, understaffing or inappropriate staffing is making it difficult, if not impossible, to provide good patient care, the nurses said.

Management wants ultimate flexibility in staffing, assigning nurses across units and even across hospitals.

Other issues include management?s demand to slash the nurses? pension fund by one-third, moving it back to 1968 economic levels.

Hospital managers say they cannot afford to increase staffing to the level sought by the nurses. Yet, as a group, Twin Cities hospitals made nearly $700 million in profits last year.

Contract talks began in March. After a bargaining session last Thursday, Cindy Olson, a critical-care nurse and a MNA negotiator, told the Minneapolis-St. Paul  Star-Tribune:

We’ve been at this for three months, and we haven’t settled anything.

Talks resume June 29. A statement posted June 24 on the union website expressed the nurses’ frustration:

Our nurses spent more than 13 hours today doing our best to stay hopeful about negotiations. Unfortunately, zero progress was made. Despite today’s setback, our nurses offered to return to the bargaining table again on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and every other day until a contract agreement can be reached. Instead, the Twin Cities Hospitals responded that the earliest they could meet would be sometime next week. It has become beyond obvious to our nurses that the Twin Cities Hospitals, despite what they continue to say publicly, have no interest in meaningful or good faith negotiations.

The nurses waged a 24-hour strike June 10. Hospital administrators kept the facilities operating with replacement nurses hired through national agencies that specialize in providing staff during strikes. In California, a similar strike by some 13,000 California Nurses Association (CNA) nurses was blocked by a court order. Click here for more. Both MNA and CNA are affiliated with National Nurses United (NNU).

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 28, 2010 (boomark / email).