Hospital nurses picket for safe staffing in Twin Cities, Duluth

June 4, 2025 by

Nurses picket outside United and Children’s hospitals in St. Paul.

For over a decade, Minnesota nurses have been fighting at the bargaining table, on the picket line and at the Capitol for staffing ratios that, they say, would help ensure quality patient care and keep nurses at the bedside.

Any hospital executive wondering whether members of the Minnesota Nurses Association would give up that fight got a resounding answer today, as thousands of nurses, dressed in MNA’s signature red, were back on picket lines at 17 hospitals in the Twin Cities and Duluth area.

“We’re not giving up on our patients,” United Hospital oncology nurse Asher Herndon said during a press conference outside the St. Paul facility. “We’re calling for safe staffing, we’re calling for dignity and we’re calling for a health care system that actually puts care first.”

MNA members picketed at Allina Health hospitals like United, as well as hospitals in the Children’s Minnesota, HealthPartners, M Health Fairview, North Memorial, Essentia and St. Luke’s systems, which are currently bargaining contracts covering over 15,000 MNA members.

The action was informational picketing, not a strike. But many union members outside United and Children’s Hospital in St. Paul wore blue stickers that said “Ready” — a warning that their next step is a strike-authorization vote if nurses don’t see progress on their top demands.

That means contract language that would set minimum staffing levels and ensure safe workloads for nurses and patients. But so far, Children’s nurse Melisa Koll said, executives across the table “simply are not interested in this idea.”

MNA President Chris Rubesch has said “shoestring, COVID-era staffing levels” remain in too many Minnesota facilities – a crisis that shows up in reports filed by hospital nurses who spot unsafe staffing in their units.

At Children’s Minnesota’s campuses alone, nurses have filed over 6,500 reports of concerns in the last 30 months, Koll said. “That means our youngest, most vulnerable patients didn’t get the care their nurses felt they needed or deserved.”

United nurse Asher Herndon speaks during a press conference on the picket line.

Some stories behind those reports are devastating.

Herndon, who said they have been assigned as many as five patients with complex medical issues at a time, recalled providing end-of-life care to a patient at the same time as they were caring for multiple others with acute needs.

“I was doing everything I could, but by the time I got back to him, he had already passed – without family, with no one there to hold his hand,” they said. “It’s not because we don’t care; it’s because there weren’t enough of us to be there for him.”

Another patient in Herndon’s unit got so frustrated waiting for help going to the bathroom that the patient tried to go alone and fell, resulting in serious injuries.

“These are not rare events,” Herndon said. “These are predictable outcomes of chronic, dangerous understaffing.”

Stories like Herndon’s are why MNA says short staffing is behind alarming levels of burnout among nurses, and increased medical costs incurred by hospitals and patients. It’s an idea backed up by research that has prompted other states – including Nevada earlier this week – to pass laws establishing limits on the number of patients that can be assigned to nurses.

Hospital systems here shouldn’t wait for lawmakers in Minnesota to act, Rubesch said. They should work together with nurses on safe staffing standards that meet local communities’ needs.

“Nurses are taking action because our health care system cannot afford more delays or excuses,” he said.

— Michael Moore, UA editor

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MN nurses double down on staffing demands with historic, three-day strike

September 16, 2022 by

Striking nurses picket outside Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.

Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association returned to work Sept. 15 after a record-breaking, three-day strike at hospitals in the Twin Cities and Duluth that energized their fight for contracts that put patients before profits.

Believed to be the largest nursing strike in Minnesota history, the walkout covered 15,000 union members and brought picket lines to 15 hospitals statewide, including United and Children’s hospitals in St. Paul.

Last-ditch contract negotiations between the nurses’ bargaining committees and seven hospital systems extended into the weekend before the strike began. But hospitals refused to budge on a key demand for union members: a voice in determining staffing levels in their units.

Staffing shortfalls that limited hospitals’ capacity during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are threatening to become the norm, nurses on the picket line said. They want more power to act when shortstaffing becomes unsafe for patients – and to refuse unsafe assignments that could jeopardize their careers.

MNA President Mary Turner said hospitals have disciplined nurses for refusing assignments they believed would put patient safety at risk. “We want assurances that we can use our intelligence and our education and our assessment skills to know whether our assignment is safe or not,” she said.

But contract proposals that would include nurses’ voice in staffing decisions – like one measure that would require support from 51% of nurses in a ward before any change to its staffing levels – have gone nowhere, according to union members at the bargaining tables.

“They don’t want to even begin to talk to us about staffing,” United emergency department nurse Brittany Livaccari said. “They keep telling us, ‘We will never give operational control to the nurses.’ But we’re not asking for operational control. We’re asking to be heard, we’re asking to protect our licenses and we’re asking to protect our patients.

“We know that the care we’ve been having to give inside this hospital since the pandemic isn’t what the community deserves. The community deserves better, and that’s what we’re asking for.”

Union nurses are also seeking significant economic increases throughout the three-year contract. Nurses say raises are needed to recruit and retain bedside professionals, prevent staffing shortfalls and keep pace with inflation. They also want family leave benefits, after many burned through their paid time off in quarantine or isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak.

But hospital administrators seized on those demands in the media and launched a joint a public-relations campaign to smear nurses as greedy and out of touch.

It rankled nurses like Melissa Koll, who works at Children’s campus in St. Paul. Her hospital system has lost 500 nurses in the last three years due to the “distress of no longer being able to provide the care with quality your children deserve,” she said.

Nurses who remain at Children’s have filed 3,500 reports documenting their concerns over the safety of staffing scenarios on their floors – more than any other hospital system in the state.

“The hospitals would like you to think this all about the money,” Koll said. “That’s simply not true.”

Union leaders acknowledged their economic demands are part of a give and take at the bargaining table, and they could come down if hospitals agreed to put staffing language into their contracts.

“If all we cared about was money, we would be out there traveling right now,” said Turner, an ICU nurse at North Memorial hospital in Robbinsdale, referring to the highly compensated temporary nurses that fill staffing shortfalls in hospitals around the country. “We are out here literally to save our profession.”

Several hospitals, however, canceled bargaining sessions scheduled with their nurses after the strike began Sept. 12, and they reiterated their call for the MNA to agree to bring a federal mediator into the talks.

Turner said mediators are appropriate to help get negotiations over the finish line when two sides are close to an agreement, and that isn’t the case at Minnesota hospitals yet.

“Once the mediator comes in, [hospital administrators] don’t face us across the table anymore,” Turner said. “In my mind, that means they never wanted to hear our stories of unsafe staffing. They never wanted to face their nurses.”

Nurses in the Twin Cities have been working without a contract since May 31. Contracts for nurses in the Duluth area expired June 30.

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Twin Cities nurses picket, demand hospitals put patients over profits

June 2, 2022 by

Nurses at United and Children’s hospitals in St. Paul combine their picket lines along Smith Avenue.

Registered nurses picketed outside 11 Twin Cities hospitals yesterday, calling on health care executives to put patients over profits in contract negotiations with their union, the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA).

Talks covering 15,000 nurses in the metro and Duluth began in March. Twin Cities nurses, who work at Allina Health, Children’s Hospital, M Health Fairview and North Memorial hospitals, saw their contracts expire Tuesday.

On a combined picket line outside United and Children’s hospitals in St. Paul, nurses said the crisis facing their profession demands urgency and bold action to keep nurses from leaving the bedside.

“I think a lot of our co-workers are waiting to see what happens with this contract to make determinations about what they’re going to do next, if they’re going to stay at the bedside,” United emergency department nurse Brittany Livaccari said. “We can’t continue to try to take care of patients and not be able to provide the care that we know they deserve. We’re ready to fight for our patients.”

But at the bargaining table, hospital administrators have failed to meet that urgency.

Instead, hospitals want concessions from the union to gain more scheduling flexibility, and they have balked at nurses’ demands for more say over staffing levels, increased pay, family and medical leave, and other measures to recruit and retain nurses.

Lisa Sanford, an intensive care nurse at Children’s in St. Paul and member of the bargaining committee, said management is back to treating nurses like numbers on a spreadsheet after showering essential workers with platitudes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For two years now we’ve been asked to put ourselves last, but now it’s become an expectation,” Sanford said. “It’s unsustainable, and it’s precisely why we have lost so many at the bedside.”

Sanford said “block scheduling” language in nurses’ previous union contract is “non-negotiable” for members of her bargaining unit, who rely on the stability it provides to care for themselves and their family members. More, she called management’s proposals to “float” more nurses between units a dangerous and unsustainable fix for staffing shortages.

“A nurse is not a nurse is not a nurse,” Sanford said. “It doesn’t do me any good to have a nurse who’s not an ICU nurse in my ICU. Nurses have set skills, and when you take them out of their environment, you put everybody at risk.”

Last month, the MNA released a report showing the number of reported staffing concerns from its members doubled from 2020 to 2021, pinning blame on hospitals for inadequately staffing units and failing to address high rates of turnover. Sanford said about 40% of nurses at her hospital have left the bedside.

But staffing issues didn’t start with the pandemic. Livaccari said Allina Health, which owns United Hospital, began “benchmarking” its nurse staffing in 2019, looking to align staffing levels with comparable hospitals in other parts of the country.

“They wanted us in the bottom 40th, meaning 60% of the hospitals that are benchmarked to (United) would have better staffing than we would,” she said. “In terms of patient care, that means we have delays, we have less time to spend individually with patients.

“Your emergency is an emergency, whether you’re about to stop breathing or your heart’s about to stop, or if you broke your arm. We don’t want you to have to wait. You shouldn’t have to wait eight hours for care. You shouldn’t even have to wait two hours, but that’s a typical thing we’re seeing.”

Livaccari and other nurses often point to short staffing’s “snowball effect,” as frustrations boil over into more nurses leaving the bedside, adding to the crisis. Many nurses that remain extend their work agreements to cover the gap, often at a cost to their own health.

“When you hear your co-workers are drowning and the patients are at risk, you want to go in,” said Sanford, who has increased her work hours by about 35%. “But it has absolutely taken a toll.”

Meanwhile, many hospitals have increased executive pay, and they continue to address high turnover rates by filling vacancies with temporary, traveling nurses, whose wages are significantly higher.

“Our CEO got a 47% increase in his pay from 2018 to 2019,” Sanford said. “I think they can handle giving us a little bit more.”

In addition to informational picketing yesterday, MNA also launched a new advertising campaign this week, highlighting hospital CEO pay and urging supporters to visit MNPatientsBeforeProfits.com to share their stories about the impact of short-staffing in hospitals.

“Hospital executives with million-dollar salaries have created a staffing and retention crisis which is pushing nurses away from the bedside,” MNA President Mary C. Turner said. “The future of our healthcare system depends on the choices we make now. Nurses are ready to fight and win for our patients and our practice. I hope the public will stand with us in our fight to put patients before profits in our hospitals.”

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Nurses fear Children’s restructuring will leave some without care

June 9, 2021 by

Forty sets of scrubs and 26 photos of hospital beds represent the nurses reassigned and services cut at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.

Pediatric nurses held informational picketing outside Children’s Hospital campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul yesterday, raising public awareness about their fight for enough staffing and beds for patients at the facilities.

Although they have raised those concerns with management repeatedly, members of the Minnesota Nurses Association said, the situation continues to worsen as the hospitals push forward with a system-wide restructuring plan.

Sydney Pederson, a nurse at Children’s St. Paul and leader in the bargaining unit, said frustrations boiled over when more patients began seeking care at the hospital, as more schools and other youth programs resumed in person.

“We have been asking for months and months for them to consider what was going to happen when we got to this point, and they have failed to make decisive, timely decisions as to how to accommodate when the patients came back,” Pederson said.

“We felt we needed to bring our nurses out to the street to show them that we feel the urgency inside the hospital, facing the families and patients that we don’t have rooms for, don’t have resources for. Hopefully, they will listen.”

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Unveiled before the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Children’s restructuring plan would shift most critical-care services to Minneapolis and downsize the St. Paul hospital, leaving it to handle more outpatient care. During the pandemic, Children’s moved to speed up the process.

The result has been bad for patients and staff alike, and nurses at both facilities are taking notice.

“Children’s is taking away services from the sickest kids served in the St. Paul hospital while placing more of a burden on the already strapped resources of the Minneapolis campus,” Children’s Minneapolis nurse Tricia Ryshkus said. “And now what’s happening is kids are waiting for care, and it’s increasing health inequities for all of these kids.”

On the picket line in St. Paul, nurses hung 40 sets of hospital scrubs on a makeshift clothesline, representing nurses the hospital has reassigned or lost since the restructuring began. They also strung photos of 26 vacant hospital beds to represent the hospital’s lost capacity for serving the community.

Nurses also called out Children’s for being slow to respond to a rise in adolescent patients seeking critical mental-health services.

Nurses at both hospitals have been let go during the restructuring, according to MNA, which says the situation has left both hospital campuses critically short-staffed and without enough beds to admit patients.

“It’s a huge concern for a community that relies on us, knowing we don’t have the beds or the staff resources to take care of them and provide the high level of care that Children’s has always been known for and that we are very proud to provide,” Pederson said. “It’s a failure to plan, and it’s a choice.”

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As reports of understaffing soar, Minnesota plummets in hospital safety rankings

October 29, 2015 by

nursespicket-web22Minnesota plummeted in a nationwide ranking of hospital safety released yesterday, but that came as no surprise to nurses, whose reports of unsafe staffing incidents in hospitals statewide have doubled over the last 12 months.

Minnesota fell from 15th to 32nd in the Hospital Safety Score rankings, based on the percentage of hospitals that receive an “A” grade in each state. Grades are determined using data collected from hospitals, including errors, injuries, accidents, infections and 28 other key patient safety metrics, and they reflect a hospital’s “overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.”

Just 18 percent of Minnesota hospitals that participated in reporting received an “A” grade, and 17 of 38 hospitals received “C” or “D” grades. Nationwide, 31 percent of reporting hospitals scored an “A” rating for patient safety.

Linda Hamilton, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, said the state’s hospitals should be leading – not lagging – when it comes to safe patient care.

“Nurses in Minnesota are saddened that patients in our hospitals are not receiving the care they need,” Hamilton said. “Hospitals need to assure patients that the care they receive isn’t being compromised by financial decisions that affect patient safety.”

The statewide nurses union has seen a major uptick in reports of unsafe staffing since Oct. 27, 2014. The 2,765 Concern for Safe Staffing Forms filed by nurses over that time period is more than double the number filed in the previous 12-month period.

Nurses file Concern for Safe Staffing forms with the MNA to track incidents of hospitals not scheduling enough nurses to meet patients’ needs. Hamilton, a bedside nurse at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, said the reports reflect “only the most critical of situations.”

“Understaffing patient care is dangerous,” she said. “That is why we speak out by calling our managers and by filling out these reports. When these nurse staffing situations become more frequent, patients pay the price.”

The Hospital Safety Score rankings are published twice a year by the Leapfrog Group, an independent nonprofit organization focused on hospital transparency.

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UPDATE: Health care workers reach agreement with Twin Cities hospitals

May 16, 2012 by

Ninety-one percent of SEIU members voted to authorize a strike at Twin Cities hospitals. (SEIU Minnesota photo)

SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, the union representing 3,500 health care workers at eight Twin Cities hospitals, announced today it has reached a tentative agreement with management, averting a strike authorized by members earlier this week.

The union said it would withhold details of the proposed contract until union members had reviewed and voted on it. Voting is scheduled for next week.

Tee McClenty, SEIU’s chief negotiator in contract talks with the hospitals, issued the following statement:

While we did not achieve all that our members deserve for the work we do every day to improve our patient’s lives, by standing together we fought back the most outrageous cuts that would have driven the lowest-paid workers in our hospitals into poverty. We will keep organizing and fighting the corporations that want to run our non-profit hospitals like for-profit institutions.

The union resumed negotiations with the eight hospitals Wednesday, armed with the support of an overwhelming majority of its members, who voted May 14 and 15 to authorize their leadership to call a two- to five-day strike if talks did not progress.

Hospitals involved in the negotiations include Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, Fairview Riverside Hospital in Minneapolis, Children’s Hospitals in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Health East’s Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul and St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale, and Park Nicollet/Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park.

Workers in negotiations include nursing assistants, emergency room technicians, maintenance and food service personnel, clerks, warehouse staff and others.

Negotiations between the two sides  broken down, the union said, as a result of the hospitals’ demands for changes in the workday, overtime provisions, vacation and sick-leave. The hospitals also sought large increases in the contribution employees make toward their health insurance coverage. The proposed changes, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota said, would have pushed many of the lowest-paid workers at Twin Cities hospitals – and their families – into poverty.

The hospitals’ insistence on squeezing givebacks out of its lowest-paid employees  angered many workers – as indicated by the strike vote, which drew support from 91 percent of voting members.

“Three years ago when the hospitals were struggling, we agreed to wage freezes so we could all focus on providing the best care possible for our patients,” said Joscelyn Barnes, a bargaining team member and Nursing Assistant at Fairview Southdale Hospital.

“Yet now, when the hospital and CEOs are earning record-breaking profits, the hospital workers that spend each day and night caring for patients are being asked to survive on even less.”

The current hospital contracts expired Feb. 29 and have been extended three times while negotiations continued.

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