After most of a year on the picket line, the nearly seven hundred nurses who struck at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, are preparing to return to work. This concludes the longest strike in the United States in 2021 and the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history. According to the nurses’ union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), it was also the longest nurses’ strike the United States has seen in more than fifteen years.

On December 17, 2021, the nurses reached a tentative contract agreement with the hospital and its for-profit owner, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare. On Monday, they voted overwhelmingly to ratify the new contract, which locks in staffing improvements to ensure patients receive better care.

The lessons we can draw from this strike are twofold. First, health care corporations like Tenet will go to every length imaginable to avoid subtracting from their profits to raise standards of care. And second, worker solidarity is the only reliable way to check these corporations’ power.