PHOTO/DANNY DIAZ, DIAZPHOTOGRAPHY
CHICAGO—On Sept. 20, some 2,200 nurses at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) carried out a one-day strike. The nurses, represented by National Nurses United (NNU), said the hospital doesn’t have enough nurses to allow for proper care of patients or to give nurses a safe working environment. Although the nurses called for only a one-day strike, the hospital then locked them out for an additional five days.
The Chicago nurses were among 8,000 nurses who went on strike the same day to support one another’s demands, including thousands at hospitals in Arizona, California and Florida.
“We strike for our patients, for our community, for safe staffing,” nurse Talisa Hardin told a press conference. “We hope that the University of Chicago gets the message and they come to the bargaining table and bargain in good faith. So we’re going on strike today because we’ve been in bargaining, our contract expired in April, and at the bargaining table we haven’t seen any significant movement on the things that are most important to us, like staffing here in the medical center. So as we feel unappreciated by the medical center, we’re finding strength in each other, and it’s beautiful.”
Another striking Chicago nurse, Stuart Berkos, told a reporter, “The important message we’re trying to tell our patients and everybody here is we’re fighting for you. We swore an oath to take care of these people and to make sure that they are taken care of just as anyone deserves to be taken care of. But unfortunately we have management that just apparently can’t agree with us.”
Nurses said they had filed some 1,700 reports to management at the hospital over the last 18 months objecting to unsafe working conditions related to short staffing.
Sheilah Garland, a retired political organizer for NNU, told the People’s Tribune that the UCMC nurses had made “15 proposals that could improve patient care and the hospital rejected all of them. So the nurses felt they had no other recourse but to strike.” She said nurses are “the last line of defense” for hospital patients because they provide 24-hour care.
She also noted that the hospital staffing situation “is horrible around the state of Illinois. You go to any hospital, the nurses are struggling to try to deliver care.” Garland attributed this to hospitals in Illinois and around the country focusing on increasing their revenue and paying top administrators multi-million dollar salaries, all at the expense of patient and staff safety. She pointed out that UCMC, although it is “not for profit,” is run based on a “corporate model.” She noted that the hospital pays no property taxes because it is designated a “charity” hospital. (Meawhile, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, UCMC President Sharon O’Keefe made $2.4 million in 2017, and UCMC Chief Nursing Officer Debra Albert made $645,516 that year.)
When hospitals are facing the prospect of “having to pay for additional nursing, they don’t want it, they want to give that money to their boards, to their investors and all of the folks who are administrators,” said Garland.
Negotiations between UCMC and the nurses are continuing, and it is possible there may be another strike.
