After months of talks and rising tension, the Minnesota Nurses Association and 14 Twin Cities hospitals reached an agreement, averting a strike scheduled for next week, Minnesota Public Radio reports. The deal could prompt nurses in other states to consider strike threats as a way to protect benefits and shield their wages from cuts.
Besides avoiding pension and benefit cuts, union negotiators succeeded in convincing the hospitals to agree not to increase the number of "low-need days" when they could send nurses home without pay because of low patient numbers.
On the flip side, nurses compromised over salary increases, according to TwinCities.com. Nurses had wanted annual raises of 3 percent or more, but won't get an increase in the first year of the contract. Raises will be limited to 1 percent in the second year, and 2 percent in the third year of the three-year contract.
The MNA also gave up its demand for mandatory nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. Instead the union agreed to work on staffing concerns through existing hospital committees.
The registered nurses and the hospitals believe a settlement of the labor agreement is in the best interests of patients and their community, according to a jointly issued press release. Instead of walking out on their jobs on July 6, the nurses will have to vote on the deal, which union leaders have endorsed.
During the heated negotiations, the nurses considered whether a strike would make the situation "a whole lot worse," Cindy Olson, a nurse at St. John's Hospital in Maplewood who was centrally involved in negotiations, told TwinCities.com. While the hospitals won't be adopting union staffing ideas, "they haven't gutted my profession either," Olson said, "and that's an important part of patient care."
The settlement could affect how nurses elsewhere behave when facing staffing and wage issues by convincing nurses in other states to go on strike, Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worchester, Mass., told Minnesota Public Radio. Threatening to strike could be one way to fight off wage cuts or freezes and protect pensions, he said.
Officials on both sides did not reveal what led to the compromise. The hospitals may have made the first concession when they offered to withdraw pension cuts if the union dropped plans for a strike. Many nurses supported the deal.
Fear of a strike may have prodded hospitals to concede on some demands. Twin Cities hospitals avoided a strike in 2001 through a last-minute deal, as well.
Some union nurses suggested that hospitals agreed to settle, because they were having trouble finding enough replacement staff, but Maureen Schriner, a spokeswoman for the negotiating hospitals, told TwinCities.com there was no connection.
To learn more:
- read the press release jointly issued by Twin Cities Hospitals and the Minnesota Nurses Association
- read Minnesota Public Radio's account
- read the Minneapolis Star Tribune article
- read the TwinCities.com piece
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