The Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) is prepared to launch what the union claims is one of the largest nurses’ strikes in US history. After a summer of stalled contract negotiations, 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities area overwhelmingly authorized a strike, sending an ultimatum to the seven corporate health care systems that employ them. They echo the demands of nurses’ unions around the country: staff our hospitals, keep nurses safe, and put “patients before profits.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar weighed in on the nurses’ side this week, both on the picket line in Minneapolis and in Jacobin, writing, “We don’t have a shortage of nurses; we have a shortage of dignified workplaces in our health care system.”

Jacobin’s Tadhg Larabee recently spoke to Kelley Anaas, an intensive care nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since before the pandemic, she says, her hospital has deprived nurses of the resources they need to care for patients as part of its shift to a “lean production” model of work. If Anaas and her colleagues go on strike, she says, it will be on behalf of the victims of this profit-seeking model.