Labor & Employment Law

12,000 Minnesota Nurses Reach Tentative Agreement with Hospitals

By James Parks

With the help of federal mediators, members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) reached a tentative agreement yesterday with 14 Twin Cities hospitals. Last week the 12,000 nurses voted to strike if there was no agreement by July 6. Instead of walking out that day, the nurses will hold a ratification vote.

The nurses were able to beat back management?s demands to slash their pension fund by one-third, which would have moved it back to 1968 economic levels, and other concessions. But the issue of patient-staff ratios was not settled in the contract. Both sides agreed to continue working on the issue through the existing committee system at each hospital.

On their website, the nurses vowed to continue the fight for better staffing policies:

Just because we ultimately could not get the safe staffing language we wanted in this particular contract does not mean this was a failure or that it can?t happen in the near future. The staffing issue has been something MNA nurses have been fighting for since the early 1990s. Remember this is a long road and the past three to four months we made major progress on the unsafe staffing issue. If we stay united and fired up about staffing, we will get there!

The nurses waged a 24-hour strike June 10. Hospital administrators kept the facilities operating with replacement nurses hired through national agencies that specialize in providing staff during strikes. In California, a similar strike by some 13,000 California Nurses Association (CNA) nurses was blocked by a court order. Click here for more. Both MNA and CNA are affiliated with National Nurses United (NNU).

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 02, 2010 (boomark / email).