More than seven months after they hit the picket line, nearly 700 unionized nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are still out on strike. This is now the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history. And according to the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), the union that represents the striking nurses, it’s the longest active picket the United States has seen in fifteen years.

The nurses have a very simple demand: They would like to return to the positions they held before concerns about patient safety pushed them out onto the picket line.

In August, following five months of hardball tactics, the hospital finally offered significant staffing improvements that the union said would enable the nurses to reenter the building “with pride in what they had accomplished.” Nevertheless, a final agreement was scuttled when the hospital suddenly insisted on a punitive return-to-work agreement that would displace striking nurses with decades of specialized experience.