On May 6, two thousand unionized nurses, technicians, and support staff at Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio began National Nurses’ Week by going on strike after nearly a year of contract negotiations. As of Friday, May 10, management had not presented union leadership with a proposal that meaningfully addressed members’ core concerns, according to UAW Local 2213 president Sue Pratt, and the strike remained ongoing.

Organized labor has deep roots in Toledo: during the Auto-Lite strike of 1934, a militant coalition of ten thousand workers from across the city successfully resisted a violent, five-day strikebreaking effort by management and the state at the cost of two lives and over two hundred injured. The strike spurred a wave of unionization in the industrial Midwest, and contributed to organized labor’s political ascendancy at the national level.

To this day, Northwest Ohio remains a labor stronghold in relative terms — of the nearly one thousand metropolitan areas where the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks union density, Toledo ranked twenty-fifth overall in 2018. But it hasn’t been spared from the national decline in private-sector union membership: just 8.7 percent of private-sector workers in Toledo were union members in 2018, down from a twenty-first-century peak of 23 percent in 2001.