After two months on the picket line, over seven hundred unionized nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are still out on strike. The walkout, which began on March 8, is the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts in decades and currently the longest active picket line in the United States. The nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), are demanding that the hospital improve staffing ratios so they can adequately care for each patient.

In the year leading up to the strike, nurses at Saint Vincent filed more than six hundred official “unsafe staffing” reports. A column in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette recounted one of these reports, wherein a nurse describes a shift in which she was assigned to care for

five patients — four of whom needed continuous oxygen monitoring. One of the patients, who also had COVID, needed peritoneal dialysis. This patient required a wide range of monitoring and analysis with any missed assessment possibly resulting in a sudden drop in blood pressure and possible cardiac arrest. Another patient was having multiple grand mal seizures — one after the other with each being more dramatic than the last. Another patient was in acute respiratory distress having multiple mucus plugs and high levels of secretions.