At 7 AM on July 12, roughly 1,200 members of the Massachusetts Nurses’ Association at Tufts Medical Center in Boston went on a one-day strike to demand adequate staffing and to protect their benefit plans from cuts attempted by the hospital administration. The following morning at 7 AM, nurses returned to find themselves locked out of the building. In retaliation for the strike, management would not allow them to re-enter until the morning of July 17, the following Monday.
The strike and lock-out at Tufts Medical Center — the largest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history and the first in Boston for decades — was foreshadowed by a similar struggle at Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Ma., only weeks earlier. On June 26, around 200 nurses with the MNA at Baystate struck work over inadequate staffing, substandard healthcare plans, and cuts to sick days and holidays. At Baystate, however, the hospital administration took the preemptive step of locking out the nurses the night before the strike began (June 25), and only allowed them back inside on the night after the strike (June 27).
Safe, sufficient hospital staffing topped the list of demands from both the Tufts and Baystate nurses. The insufficient number of nurses currently hired at the two hospitals obliges nurses to take on an additional, exhausting workload, on top of what is already an exhausting job. Standard shifts of 12 hours frequently lengthen to 16, as nurses work late rather than leave their patients with partial care or their co-workers with an even steeper workload.
“People are tired of the overtime,” said Helen Keaney, a pediatric nurse with 39 years’ experience at Tufts. “If it happens once or twice, people will step up and come in and help people out, but it’s almost an everyday occurrence now.”
The frequent overtime presents an even larger problem for nurses with families: as Keaney said, “In the winter it’s not as bad, but [in] the summer people want to be home and they want to be with their family, their kids are out of school, they don’t have the daycare to help, and it’s tough — and you know that you’re leaving your peers in a bad situation.”
Understaffing is a threat to patient safety, as well as a burden for nurses, as patients often must sit through long waits before receiving appropriate care. Tufts nurses expressed particular concern over patients waiting three to four hours to receive intravenous drips, due to a shortage of qualified nurses. Furthermore, when nurses must attend to many patients at one time– sometimes up to seven, at Baystate — it decreases the quality of the care they can give each individual patient. In the words
of Donna Stern, full-time registered nurse and senior co-chair of the MNA bargaining unit at Baystate: “Our working conditions are your health conditions.”
Both Tufts and Baystate also want to cut nurses’ benefits, with Tufts particularly targeting nurses’ pensions and Baystate targeting healthcare. In 2005, Tufts stopped letting new nurses into their defined pension benefit plan, which now only covers 341 of the total 1,200 nurses.
In this round of negotiations, Tufts wanted to freeze contributions to that plan for the remaining 341 nurses, which would strike especially hard at those who still have many years until retirement. The nurses proposed alternative pension plans during negotiations, but Tufts wanted to stick to a plan in which nurses pay 50 percent of the contributions to their pensions, to be matched by the hospital — so that if nurses can’t pay into their pensions, the hospital will provide nothing.
For many, this means an adequate pension in retirement will come at the cost of a substantial portion of their current salary, often an unsustainable financial burden.
Baystate, for its part, recently discontinued two of its healthcare plans, and refused to bargain over them during negotiations. This narrowed the already inflexible and costly healthcare plans available to Baystate nurses, for when nurses actually need to draw upon their healthcare, they are virtually forced to receive care from the Baystate system itself by the high costs of leaving the Baystate system. This allows Baystate to profit off of its own employees.
Nurses driven to strike
With such a lack of cooperation from management during negotiations, the nurses at both hospitals voted to authorize one-day strikes — on March 13 with a majority of 93 percent at Baystate, and on March 29 at Tufts with 95 percent. The strike at Baystate began at 6 AM on June 26, and the Tufts strike at 7 AM on July 12.
Liberation News visited the picket line at Tufts. Hundreds of nurses and their supporters marched back and forth along Washington Street. Countless signs and placards displayed slogans like “Support Tufts Nurses,” “For Our Patients, For Our Profession, Secure Our Contract,” and “If They’re Out HERE, There’s Something Wrong in THERE.”
Drivers on Washington Street — from commuters, to bus drivers, to sanitation workers — honked their horns in support, eliciting cheers from the picket line.
Notably, the strike received support from many Tufts patients. Some came to the picket line itself, while others made themselves known on social media.
On Thursday, the word on the picket line held that the cartons of coffee set out for the nurses that morning were brought by a patient’s father.
Many unions showed up to the picket in support, including numerous building trades unions, Unite Here Local 26, and the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association. In fact, Local 26 President Brian Lang and Massachusetts Teachers’ Association President Barbara Madeloni were present for part of the picket.
A number of local politicians also passed through the rally, including Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who commented that the strike “helps no one.”
Though the lock-out on Thursday morning was expected, it still saddened and disappointed many nurses. However, they remained firmly committed to their demands. Two nurses, who have worked at Tufts since 1974 and 1986, said their co-workers felt “empowered” by the strike, but also “very, very, very upset” about having to leave their patients — in fact, some of the nurses were crying when they left the hospital to join the picket, especially pediatric nurses. Tufts hired “replacement” or “agency” nurses as substitutes for the union nurses for the duration of the strike and lock-out.
Though the hospital insisted that operations were running smoothly under the direction of the agency nurses, scattered reports reached the union nurses from ancillary staff still at work in the hospital which indicated that the quality of care had deteriorated. The two veteran nurses, when asked on Thursday what the public should know about their struggle, were unanimous: “We want to be inside taking care of our patients.”
Nurses struggle, patients suffer, bosses profit
Donna Stern, senior co-chair of the bargaining unit at Baystate, listed “three evils” in healthcare, forces which engage with the healthcare system only to profit, not to provide care: namely, big pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies and hospital administrations. The Baystate and Tufts nurses strikes exemplify the lengths to which hospital administrations will go to exploit their workers. Their refusal to negotiate with the MNA in good faith proves beyond any doubt that hospital administrations are in the business of making profits, not delivering quality healthcare. Rather, it is nurses who are on the front lines of caring for all of us, but without nurses’ unions like the MNA, they would be left with little means of protection and power, at the mercy of hospital administrations.
As the Baystate and Tufts strikes demonstrated, hospital administrations are also increasingly unified and coordinated. Stern observed that they seem to be drawing from “the same playbook”: both administrations proposed harsh cuts, refused to bargain in negotiations, and locked the nurses out when they went on strike — lock-outs being an especially new and usual tactic, according to Stern.
Notably, both hospital administrators are members of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, a statewide “non-profit” organization that currently displays on its website such insulting headlines as “Nurses’ Union Deliberately Trying to Sabotage Hospitals.”
Faced with such unity amongst such draconian management, it is ever more important for nurses to maintain unity amongst themselves through a strong union.
Stern also spoke to a long, personal experience with sexism from the hospital administration at Baystate. With a workforce that is over 92 percent women, it is surely no coincidence that the administration expects workers to accept their aggressive bargaining without a fight — to be “quiet and happy.” Despite a superficial commitment to diversity on “glossy brochures,” Stern still found Baystate to be “misogynistic, patriarchal, [and] old-school.”
Perhaps more so than hospital administrations and big pharmaceutical companies, Stern singled out health insurance companies of the “three evils” as particularly villainous. The insurance companies, she said, have “no business” in healthcare — they are only in it “to make money off you,” and they “behave like they’re Wall St. executives.”
Keaney also noted the great wealth flowing to insurance companies rather than to medical care, observing that despite recent renovations and remodeling in nearby insurance company buildings, “[in] the patient rooms the chairs are falling apart.” She rejected the hospital administration’s narrative that their attempted austere cutbacks to nurses’ benefits and their refusal to negotiate over staffing were only motivated by financial constraints. “The co-chair of our committee was saying, ‘It’s not a
financial crisis, it’s a priority crisis,’ and that’s essentially what it is. It’s like what are your priorities, what do you want to spend your money on — and unfortunately, they’re not thinking about the patient.”
A far cry from prioritizing patients, in fact, Tufts management’s greedy, anti-nurse agenda actually risks a generational crisis at the hospital, as it is unable to retain younger nurses. Keaney explained: “The wages are so bad, and their assignments are so bad, and their support from the upper management is so bad…[younger nurses] take off out of the hospital. So they’re going to have a huge problem in a few years when people my age and older retire, because who’s there to take care of the patient at that point?”
Capitalism degrades healthcare
“Patients aren’t patients anymore — they’re consumers.” With this example, Stern illustrated the rise of a new “business-focused terminology” in healthcare. The new, corporate vocabulary has taken hold as more and more hospitals have passed from public to private control and ownership over the past several decades. Such trends in healthcare — rising privatization accompanied by the erosion of wages, working conditions, labor protections, benefits, and quality of service, pushed by aggressive, emboldened management — are likely to ring familiar for many workers throughout the country and around the world. In the long assault on the working class often referred to as “neoliberalism,” the actions of Tufts Medical Center and Baystate Franklin Medical Center are only Massachusetts’ two latest cases. Against this assault, we must stand united: Solidarity with the MNA!
