Eight Hundred Pennsylvania Nurses Went on Strike This Week. Now They’re Locked Out.
Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center have been dealing with understaffing, long hours, low pay, and a lack of protective equipment throughout the pandemic. This past week, they decided to go on strike to push their hospital to take measures needed to keep patients safe.
In discussing the strike, nurses acknowledge the high stakes of such a workplace action at a hospital during the pandemic, but say that it is precisely these stakes that led them to strike. (PASNAP)
“What led us to strike is the same thing that led us to unionize: patient safety,” says Beth Redwine, a “mother-baby” nurse who works in the maternity ward at St. Mary Medical Center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Redwine is one of nearly eight hundred nurses who went on strike Tuesday in response to what she and her coworkers described as foot-dragging by Trinity Health, which bought St. Mary in 2015, during what has been a nearly yearlong contract negotiation.
Livonia, Michigan–based Trinity owns over ninety hospitals nationwide. As for St. Mary, nurses describe it as a profitable institution. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the hospital “made an average of $58 million in annual profit in the last three years,” according to Trinity financial documents, making it one of the region’s most profitable hospitals. They say that their problems began not with the pandemic, but when Trinity took over the hospital.
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