Nurses at UChicago Medicine announced Monday they will go on a one-day strike March 14 to call attention to staffing concerns amid a breakdown in contract negotiations.
The strike is planned to start at 7 a.m. and last for 24 hours. Nurses will gather outside of the hospital, 5841 S. Maryland Ave., according to a news release from the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United, which represents about 2,800 nurses employed by the University of Chicago Medical Center.
The announcement comes after 97% of voters in February cast “yes” votes in favor of a strike because of “little to no movement on key issues” since new contract negotiations began in October, according to the news release.
Amber Turi, an ICU nurse at UChicago Medicine and a member of the bargaining team, said Monday the team has “reached an impasse” with management and are “forced ” to strike because they can’t proceed with a new contract without the hospital coming to terms on staffing.
“I’m just really disappointed that it’s gotten to this point,” Turi told the Tribune. “I want to be hopeful that we could avert a strike, but it’s doubtful at this point. When you are working short-staffed, it gets harder and harder to go to work because your patient load is so high. It creates moral injury when you can’t give your best to your patients. It’s the number one thing on all our surveys, staffing concerns.”
Nurses at UChicago recorded having missed almost 250,000 lunches in 2022, Turi said, which is roughly 86 missed meal breaks per nurse.
“Our patients depend on us to be alert and to not be fatigued, and you can only achieve that by having breaks,” Turi said. “We feel like we deserve better, and our patients deserve better.”
At UChicago’s Mitchell Hospital in Hyde Park, Turi said one issue facing nurses is that charge nurses, or the nurse in charge of a floor, are also taking care of patients, “which is a difficult thing to do.” Ideally, a charge nurse would not have patient assignments, Turi said.
Operating room nurses who are called in to work emergency trauma cases and surgeries overnight are then expected to come in for their regular shift the next day, Turi said, and they are asking that those nurses get at least 12 hours of rest before having to get back to work.
Other points of concern for the nurses include retirement, infectious disease language included in the new contract that would make sure the hospital bargains with staff for additional compensation in the event of another pandemic or similar situation, and retention rates. Turi said over 1,600 nurses have left the hospital system since October 2020.
A statement from the UChicago Medical Center on Monday said nurses are “essential partners of our patient care teams.”
“While we are disappointed in the NNU’s decision to take this action, we are committed to continuing negotiations in hopes of reaching an agreement and avoiding a strike,” the statement said. “At this point, a strike is not a foregone conclusion, and there is time to reach an agreement through ongoing negotiations at the bargaining table. However, after today, the union has agreed to only two more days of bargaining prior to the start of the strike.”
Turi said there have been two bargaining sessions since the strike authorization vote last month and one more is scheduled for next week. She said the bargaining team and the hospital are “talking about adding more dates.”
The nurses were required by federal law to give 10 days notice of the strike, Turi said, to give the hospital time to secure replacements. Although the strike is one day, the nurses will not go back to work for four additional days, just like what happened after the nurses’ last one-day strike in 2019.
“The premise is because they are hiring strike nurses to take our place, they have to offer those nurses a contract and they’re saying that contract is for five days,” Turi said.
The hospital said in the statement that the “focus will be on serving patients without disruption,” and “hundreds of highly-skilled replacement nurses” have been contracted.
“To be clear, no one wins in a strike,” the hospital’s statement said. “Not our nurses, not the Medical Center, and certainly not our patients and the South Side community that relies on us for care. We all know the real work of reaching a contract is accomplished at the bargaining table and hope the union agrees to more bargaining dates in March.”
