Less than two months after Twin Cities hospitals and the 12,000 nurses narrowly avoided a strike, 1,300 nurses in Duluth Wednesday overwhelmingly voted to approve a one-day walkout to protest stalled contract negotiations with St. Luke’s Hospital and St. Mary’s Medical Center.
And the Minnesota Nurses Association’s (MNA) stated top issue? You guessed it! Staffing problems!
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The nurses’ contract expired July 1. The hospitals offered a three-percent pay raise over three years and to boost its subsidy of monthly health insurance premiums to 85 percent from 70 percent for dependent coverage. (That sounds pretty good. When is the last time you heard of an employer offering to pay more for coverage?)
But the main sticking point seems to be a matter of language. The union wants to close a hospital unit “for a period of time” to new patients if staffing levels aren’t adequate. The hospitals prefer to say unit traffic is “redirected or temporarily delayed.”
If history serves as any guide, the MNA will not hesitate to launch the one-day strike. Such a move attracts enormous publicity (it would be the first nursing shutdown in Duluth’s history) without risking patient safety while costing the hospitals beaucoup bucks to hire temporary replacements.
The larger question is whether the MNA has the guts to launch an indefinite strike. The union certainly blinked in the Twin Cities, accepting the hospitals’ terms on work rules and wages rather than strike there. Perhaps it will adopt a bolder strategy in a smaller market like Duluth, about two hours north of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
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