The largest open-ended nurses’ strike in recent US history is over. After thirty-eight days on the picket line at various sites in the Minneapolis–St Paul area, 4,800 defiant members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) voted last week to accept a deal hammered out after seventeen straight hours of negotiations with the largest hospital chain in the Twin Cities, Allina Health.

The walkout was the logical (and to some degree inevitable) consequence of the increased corporatization of health care in the US. While legally and structurally a non-profit, Allina Health (and most other health care institutions) nonetheless operates like a profit-seeking enterprise, exhibiting little regard for workers’ wellbeing.

The conditions that drove Allina nurses to strike are the same conditions facing so many workers in caregiving industries today: the unholy trinity of health insurance cuts, declining staff levels, and increasingly unsafe working conditions.