Mental health workers notify Allina, Fairview of intent to strike again

September 26, 2022 by

Mental health workers picketed outside MHealth Fairview hospital during a one-day strike in May

More Twin Cities health care workers are poised to strike for safer hospital staffing.

Mental health workers at MHealth Fairview and two Allina Health hospitals notified the providers today of their intent to open a three-day strike Oct. 3. The bargaining units bring together over 400 essential employees who organized unions with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa last year.

The union announced 98% of participating members voted to authorize a three-day strike last month, a sign of increasing frustration with the lack of progress toward first contracts that address their top priorities.

“We are ready to strike because we are facing dangerous staffing levels and it feels like no one in power cares,” said Dana Disbrow, a psychiatric associate at MHealth Fairview. “The current staffing situation is a nightmare, and we are fighting for a fair contract that finally addresses these concerns.”

In addition to staffing shortfalls, union members want contract language that addresses safety issues inside their buildings, including threats of gun violence.

“We face many challenging and risky situations every shift,” said Amanda Reasor, a senior mental health coordinator at Allina Unity Hospital. “We want to be able to have the resources we need to cope with the constant stress that we are under and have guidelines that further protect us from harm.”

Union members raised those concerns in a one-day strike May 24, during Mental Health Awareness Month. But Kellie Benson, senior mental health coordinator at Abbott, said hospital administrators still aren’t listening.

“The longer our employers dismiss the significant concerns raised by staff working face to face with patients in mental health care, the harder it will be to heal, not only for those experiencing mental health crises, but for our entire community,” Benson said.

Union members work as psych associates and behavioral assistants at MHealth Fairview Hospital, and as senior mental health coordinators at Allina Health’s Abbott Northwestern and Unity hospitals.

MHealth and Allina employees bargain at separate tables, and each unit has one scheduled session left before the unfair-labor-practice strike is scheduled to start.

The systems were among those affected by a historic, three-day strike by 15,000 members of the Minnesota Nurses Association earlier this month. Like nurses fighting for contracts that put patients over profits, mental health workers said they are fighting for contracts stabilize their industry for workers and patients

“It is unfortunate that we feel the only way Allina will hear us is if we take drastic action,” Reasor said. “We have made immense strides toward a fair resolution while also demanding fair wages, wholistic benefits, and a safer workplace. We deserve to be treated like the professionals we are, yet Allina has come back time and time again saying ‘not interested’ to some of the most important facets to our contract.

“If we don’t see significant strides on Allina’s part, we will strike.”

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Nurses’ picket lines swell with community, labor support

September 16, 2022 by

“The people of Minnesota stand with you,” Gov. Tim Walz tells striking United and Children’s hospital nurses.

The Minnesota Nurses Association’s trademark red radiated from picket lines outside Twin Cities hospitals during the union’s three-day strike Sept. 12-14, but nurses were far from alone.

Elected officials, union leaders and supporters from the community bolstered nurses’ ranks, honking horns, joining picket lines and dropping off coffee and treats for the health care heroes standing up to millionaire hospital CEOs to demand safer staffing and better patient care.

“The people of Minnesota stand with you,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told union nurses outside United Hospital on Day 2 of the strike. Walz thanked them for their compassion and service to the state during the pandemic, and he applauded them for using their collective bargaining rights to advocate for their patients and their profession.

“Your message has never been lost,” Walz said. “You walk here to protect patients and Minnesotans. You walk here today to make sure health care is delivered in the safest, most efficient manner. And you walk here today to make sure young people see this profession for what it is – caring, valuable and important to Minnesota.”

State Sen. Erin Murphy of St. Paul, herself a registered nurse, praised MNA members for following their “professional obligation to raise their voices” when they see something wrong, and she called on hospital executives to listen to those voices at the bargaining table.

“We need to heed (nurses’) warning that the understaffing that continues inside our hospitals is undermining their ability to do their jobs with care,” Murphy said.

Executive officers of Education Minnesota stand in solidarity with striking nurses in St. Paul.

Members of local unions brought their colors – and solidarity – to the strike line too.

SEIU members who work alongside nurses as technicians and support staff held rallies at Abbott Northwestern and M-Health Fairview hospitals in Minneapolis. The Teamsters Local 120 semi blared its horn while cruising past several picket lines. And dozens of St. Paul educators, whose union made history with a “strike for the schools St. Paul students deserve” in 2020, joined nurses at United and Children’s.

Denise Specht, president of the statewide educators’ union, said solidarity with nurses comes easily for Education Minnesota members, who take similar issues into their contract negotiations, like workplace safety and adequate staffing to meet students’ needs.

“These nurses are talking about many of the same things we’re hearing in our schools,” Specht said. “They are seeing people walking away from the profession. They are feeling stretched thin. They don’t have professional respect in the workplace. We see that all over in teaching, too.”

Executive officers of the state’s largest labor federation, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, said its affiliate unions, representing over 300,000 working people, stand in “full solidarity” with MNA nurses – during the strike and as long as it takes to get the contracts they deserve.

“Millionaire hospital executives … need to listen to nurses when they tell them patients need hospitals that are fully staffed with nurses who aren’t overworked,” Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham and Secretary-Treasurer Brad Lehto said in a statement. “They should follow the nurses’ lead and put patients before profits.”

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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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Hospital nurses in Twin Cities, Duluth vote to authorize strike

August 16, 2022 by

Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association announce plans to take a strike vote.

Nurses at 15 Minnesota hospitals voted yesterday to authorize a strike, after union negotiators accused health care executives of refusing to bargain contracts that protect the safety of their patients and address the crisis facing their profession.

“What we are being forced to do is totally against every ethical principal that we have,” Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) President Mary Turner said, choking back tears during a press conference announcing the strike vote. “But we have no choice.”

A strike could put as many as 15,000 nurses on the picket line at 12 hospitals in the Twin Cities and three in Duluth. According to the MNA, it would be one of the largest nursing strikes in U.S. history, and the first time Twin Cities and Twin Ports nurses went on strike together.

Bargaining units are legally obligated to give hospitals 10 days’ notice before any work stoppage.

MNA members have been in bargaining with the hospital systems – Allina Health, M-Health Fairview, Children’s, HealthPartners and North Memorial in the Twin Cities – since March. They have focused their contract campaign on improving patient care by investing in measures to keep hospital nurses at the bedside.

It’s the first round of talks since COVID-19 shocked the health care landscape, and MNA members – in the media, at the Capitol and via workplace actions – have been sounding the alarm about the toll staffing shortfalls are taking on patient care and staff morale.

A report issued by the Minnesota Department of Health earlier this month showed a 33% increase in adverse events in Minnesota hospitals from 2020 to 2021. Union leaders pinned the blame on short staffing and retention issues, noting MNA members’ own reports of unsafe staffing concerns have increased 300% since 2014.

“Our management, our leaders have failed,” said Amy McGlone, a nurse and member of the Children’s Hospital bargaining team. “They have failed us nurses, as well as the patients and families who come through our doors for care… What is happening in our hospitals is not safe and not sustainable.”

As the crisis continues to deepen, even more nurses are considering giving up on the profession or moving to positions away from the bedside, studies suggest.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute (ILEPI) issued a report in June that found 51% of surveyed nurses considered leaving the profession within the next year, and they cited short staffing and moral distress as the driving factors. That constitutes a “public health crisis,” Turner said, and it is a direct consequence of “corporate health care policies pursued by our hospital executives with million-dollar salaries.”

“Our management, our leaders have failed,” says Amy McGlone, a nurse and member of the Children’s Hospital bargaining team.

“Our integrity dictates we demand the kind of care that we would want for ourselves, our families and our loved ones – for every single patient that crosses our threshold,” said Meghan Matteson, an acute rehab nurse at Fairview Riverside.

“The best care possible is not receiving emergent care in a hallway. The best care possible is not having to wait hours for a higher level of care – sometimes days. The best care possible is not having nurses with more patients than we can care for safely. Unfortunately, this is our current reality.”

To turn the tide in their profession, Minnesota nurses are seeking new contracts that include wage increases and a seat at the table in decisions about staffing levels in their units.

They also want paid family leave, after many health care workers zeroed out their paid time off while isolating, quarantining or caring for family members affected by the pandemic. At least one hospital system, according to a nurse at the bargaining table, has responded to the request for paid family leave by suggesting nurses buy their own short-term disability insurance.

“Fairview has taken advantage of our goodwill during this pandemic and has highly normalized this chaotic staffing situation that we are currently in,” HealthEast nurse Katie Donner said. “We’ve risked our lives and the health of our families to care for our community. Our community recognizes us, so why won’t Fairview?”

The community may get an opportunity to show its support for nurses on the picket line soon, if the strike vote – which drew support from a “supermajority” of nurses who cast ballots – doesn’t prompt hospital executives to get serious about the union’s demands.

“We don’t take this decision lightly,” Turner said. “All 15,000 nurses want to be at the bedside, but we have been driven to this. We have tried to put forward proposals that would bring back nurses to the bedside, but they are not interested. For the safety of our patients, we need to take this action.”

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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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Safe staffing concerns soar among Minnesota nurses

May 11, 2022 by

Abbott Northwestern nurses Angela Becchetti (L) and Becky Nelson talk about the impact of shortstaffing on patient care in their hospital.

The Minnesota Nurses Association released data today showing the number of reported staffing concerns from its members doubled from 2020 to 2021, prompting union members who joined a Capitol press conference to plead for action from lawmakers and hospital administrators.

“Each one of these represents multiple incidents and multiple patients who are not getting the care they deserve,” MNA President Mary Turner said, pointing to a stack of 7,857 paper reports submitted by union nurses in 2021. “And why is this? Because our hospitals continue to treat us like we’re factory workers and our patients are on an assembly line.”

The new report compiles and analyzes reports submitted last year by MNA members concerned that short staffing may have negatively impacted patient care during their shift. The reports documented 9,381 cases in which understaffing delayed nurses’ ability to administer medication, complete a patient assignment, answer patient call lights or otherwise deliver care.

In over 80% of those cases, managers failed to respond to the concerns adequately, according to the report.

MNA has been collecting reports of unsafe staffing for over 25 years, and cases have increased 300% since 2014.

The staffing crisis reached a tipping point during the COVID-19 pandemic, as nurses like Jean Forman walked away from the profession. The former Abbott Northwestern nurse cited persistent frustrations over staffing, which weighed on her mental health.

“Hospital executives have watched reports of unsafe staffing increase and have done nothing to solve the crisis,” Forman said. “It is time for action, before more nurses reach the same conclusion I did, that they can no longer care for patients the way they were trained and called to do.”

MNA President Mary Turner, pictured with concern-for-safe-staffing forms collected by the union, is an ICU nurse at North Memorial hospital.

The statewide nurses union is pushing for action on two fronts: at the bargaining table and at the Capitol.

Legislation passed by the DFL-controlled House would set a hard cap on the number of patients under any hospital nurse’s charge, require hospitals to be more transparent and give nurses a say in unit-specific staffing limits in their hospitals, whether or not they are unionized.

The Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act would also direct funds to recruit and retain nurses, including $5 million for student loan forgiveness, and it would fund new mental health programs for hospital staff.

The bill has not been heard in the Senate, but MNA members are holding out hope for its prospects in end-of-session negotiations and Gov. Tim Walz this month.

Becky Nelson, chair of the MNA’s Government Affairs Commission and a nurse at Abbot Northwestern, credited an “incredible outpouring of energy” from nurses this legislative session for getting the bill passed in the House.

“From new nurses just months or years out of school to those who have been in this career for decades, we all recognize that the current staffing practices in our health care system are not sustainable,” Nelson said.

Nurses also continue to push for staffing language in their collective bargaining agreements, something MNA has been fighting to win “as long as I’ve been a nurse,” Abbott Northwestern RN Angela Becchetti said.

“Executives use phrases like ‘lean,’ ‘just-in-time staffing’ or ‘benchmarking,’” she said. “But the outcome is always the same: asking fewer nurses to care for more patients with less resources and support.”

Nurses in the Twin Cities area and Duluth are currently in contract bargaining with their employers. The talks cover about 15,000 union members.

Twin Cities nurses’ contracts are set to expire May 31, but union leaders said an extension was likely.

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As staffing crisis deepens, DFL lawmakers respond with bill to keep nurses at bedside

February 4, 2022 by

Nurses and lawmakers hold a press conference to unveil the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act.

Minnesota lawmakers are taking aim at the staffing crisis in Minnesota hospitals and its crushing toll on registered nurses and their mental health.

Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association joined DFL lawmakers at a Capitol press conference Thursday. They unveiled legislation that would set a hard cap on the number of patients under any nurse’s charge, require hospitals to be more transparent and give nurses a say in unit-specific staffing limits in their hospitals.

The Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act would also direct funds to recruit and retain nurses, including $5 million for student loan forgiveness, and it would fund new mental health programs for hospital staff.

Sen. Erin Murphy, a registered nurse and the bill’s chief author, called the measure “a hyperlocal, hospital-by-hospital approach” to dealing with the staffing crisis.

“This is no quick fix,” she said. “This is a comprehensive proposal to prepare and retain Minnesota’s nurses at the bedside.”

Sen. Melissa Lopez Franzen listens to MNA member Becky Nelson (L) and retired member Jean Forman talk about conditions in hospitals.

Union nurses have been clamoring for action on unsafe staffing levels in their hospitals since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began, making the issue a focal point of their contract and legislative campaigns.

But the pandemic has deepened the crisis. As hospitals buckled under the pressure of multiple COVID-19 waves, some nurses opted to take more lucrative work as temporary “travelers,” while others, like Jean Forman, opted to leave the profession rather than watch standards further erode.

“I left knowing that my moral compass no longer aligned with my employer’s, and that was really hard,” said Forman, who retired from her job as an intensive care nurse at Abbott Northwestern last year.

Becky Nelson, chair of MNA’s Government Affairs Commission, has stuck with her job at Abbott, but the stress of being asked “to do more with less” has led to depression and stress-related hair loss, she said.

While nurses are “putting their physical and mental well being on the line,” St. Joseph’s nurse Daniel Clute added, the impact of short staffing on patient care “keeps us up at night, haunting us.”

Nelson and Clute aren’t the only ones speaking up. Over 200 MNA members joined a virtual town hall with legislators last month, flooding the chat with heartbreaking stories from the front lines and pleas for assistance.

MNA President Mary Turner, a nurse in North Memorial’s COVID ICU, said members reported more than four times as many incidents of unsafe staffing in their hospitals last year – 7,800 reports statewide – as they did in 2014.

The staffing crisis “keeps us up at night, haunting us,” said St. Joseph’s nurse Daniel Clute.

“The thing is, it’s the patients who suffer,” Turner said. “It’s the patients who don’t get turned every hour and a half to two. It’s the patients who don’t get their bathing done. It’s the patients who don’t get the help eating. It’s the medication that maybe isn’t given on time. It’s the treatments that don’t get done…

“We are here because we, honest to God, are seeing that our patients are suffering, and it is intolerable to us.”

Gov. Tim Walz has earmarked $40 million in federal relief funds to reinforce staffing – primarily among nurses – in Minnesota hospitals this winter. Members of the Minnesota National Guard are also deployed to some hospitals.

But the legislation unveiled yesterday, Nelson said, is the kind of long-term solution needed “to ensure hospital executives adhere to the staffing grids they set, and that there are programs in place to support nurses at the bedside, where we want to be.”

Added Clute: “We aren’t trying to sink hospital systems with unreasonable demands. We’re trying to preserve the quality and standards that will keep Minnesota being one of the best states for health care for years to come. We’re trying to protect our patients and our practice.”

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Union members urge hospitals to address staffing shortfalls with higher wages

December 6, 2021 by

Hospital workers, clockwise from top-left, Cliff Adams, Emilee Greskowiak, Lolita Granados and Steele Miller joined a virtual press conference on staffing shortfalls.

About 8,000 health care workers have publicly offered to renegotiate their union contracts with Twin Cities hospitals in an effort to help address staffing shortfalls that, workers warn, are only getting worse.

Members of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota announced the offer Nov. 30 in a virtual press conference, during which they described the impact short staffing has had on patient care in the hospitals where they work.

Emilee Greskowiak, a nursing assistant at United Hospital in St. Paul, said understaffing impacts patient comfort, safety and hygiene. She noted that it has been nearly two years since she’s had time to help her most patients shower.

Recently, Greskowiak added, she was the only aide serving a 25-patient ward, where registered nurses were understaffed, too.

“All I can do is empty trashes and let nurses know when people are drowning – having codes and rapids and struggling to survive through their traumas,” she said. “Nurses are barely getting their meds in by the end of shift, let alone proper care and hygiene that families desperately need to … become healthy.”

Some patients don’t get a bed at all, added Cliff Adams, a nursing station tech at M-Health Fairview Riverside Masonic Children’s Hospital. He said his unit, which treats patients with cancer and blood diseases, could not fill eight of its 24 beds recently because the “caregiver-to-patient ratio wasn’t adequate to safely provide care” to more than 16 patients.

“That meant eight beds – eight kids – did not have an opportunity to be properly cared for,” Adams said.

Understaffing is not a new problem at metro hospitals. Workers pointed to several reasons their co-workers have walked away or scaled back their hours in recent years, including the additional pressures created by the COVID-19 pandemic, once again surging in Minnesota.

But while workers see their bosses asking them to skip breaks, extend their shifts and postpone paid time off, what they don’t see from management is a plan to deal with the problem.

“It’s caused tension among staff members because we don’t have enough staff to go around,” said Lolita Granados, a clinical support specialist at Children’s in Minneapolis. “We’re missing sleep, we barely have time to eat, and we are tired.

“It is currently worse than I have ever experienced this before. We need help and support, and I would like the hospitals executives who are working from home … to step up.”

In letters to those executives, SEIU Healthcare leaders pointed to other hospitals in Minnesota that have reopened union contracts to increase wage rates and write in other incentives aimed at attracting and retaining workers, and they requested metro facilities do the same.

Twin Cities hospitals settled new, three-year contracts with SEIU members earlier this year, but wages were a sticking point in negotiations. Some 4,000 workers at United and other Allina locations were poised to strike before reaching an 11th hour agreement with the provider.

Those agreements call for wage increases ranging from 5% to 7.5% over three years. But with inflation on the rise, it’s already clear to workers like Methodist Hospital ER tech Steele Miller that hospitals need to do more.

“People are leaving these jobs for jobs that are less traumatic, less stressful, less exhausting and that pay more,” Miller said. “We are not greedy. We just need to be able to take care of ourselves while we take care of other people.”

Workers also noted that many hospitals are already paying temporary workers – so-called “travelers” – higher wages to deal with the shortage, and they called out executives like M Health Fairview CEO James Hereford, whose annual compensation has ballooned to over $3 million. Allina CEO Penny Wheeler recently topped the $2 million mark.

For Hereford, Wheeler and other hospital executives, Greskowiak offered some pointed advice.

“If you give us better pay and benefits, maybe you’ll keep and retain the staff that you have – and then also get more staff to help us get through this hard time,” she said. “Everyone’s traumatized and underpaid and missing their family and doesn’t want to do this anymore.

“It’s exhausting, and you’re burning out your staff left and right.”

 

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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.”

Filed Under: Organizing, Union Events Tagged With: , , ,

Teamsters end beer strike, credit ‘labor solidarity’ for keeping them strong

May 25, 2018 by
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J.J. Taylor drivers Adrian Wiegert (L) and Mark Hennum picket outside the facility with other members of Teamsters Local 792.

Beer truck drivers and helpers at J.J. Taylor Distributing in Minneapolis voted overwhelmingly to ratify a new contract last night, ending their seven-week strike.

Not one member of Teamsters Local 792 crossed the picket line during the strike, and all 93 striking workers will return to their jobs, as the company was unable to hire permanent replacements.

“I can honestly say I’ve never been a part of a group that looks out for each other like we did,” Darin Bakken, a helper with five years of experience at J.J. Taylor, said. “This is a very strong group.”

Larry Yoswa, Local 792’s secretary-treasurer, attributed the unity to broad community support. Several bars, restaurants and liquor stores refused to accept deliveries from J.J. Taylor during the strike, and a list of beers distributed by the company went viral on the internet with the hashtag #ratscabbeer, prompting many consumers to buy different brands.

This week, workers began passing out the fliers to fans on their way into St. Paul Saints games.

“One of the beer vendors … stopped at the picket line,” Bakken said. “He said what we did outside was huge. There were a lot of people who took a peek at that list before he could pour a beer.”

But the biggest source of strength, Yoswa said, was labor solidarity.

“Labor in this state was what really helped us stay out so long,” he said. “The locals of Teamsters Joint Council 32 stepped up big time. We had the nurses out here, the postal workers, all of the trades — everybody saw the news and got out here.

“That’s what kept them solid for seven weeks, knowing they had that kind of support.”

Yoswa characterized the new contract as a “bittersweet victory” for workers, who took a stand for safety on the job. The two sides were able to reach a compromise on union members’ top priority, keeping two workers on keg-heavy routes.

Bakken, who has worked for 20 years in the beer industry, said the trend toward increasing workloads is a dangerous one. “You can’t have one guy all alone handling all the kegs day after day, year after year,” he said. “You’re going to get hurt, and your career is done.”

Now, workers are looking forward to seeing the people on their delivery route again – especially the ones who stood with Teamsters in the fight. McDonald’s Liquor and Wine in Minneapolis, one of the stops on Bakken’s route, had an empty cooler where the Miller Lite display usually goes.

“That’s pretty damn cool that they’re standing up for us,” he said.

[CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FULL LIST OF BARS AND LIQUOR STORES THAT SUPPORTED TEAMSTERS IN THEIR STRIKE FOR SAFE JOBS.]

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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