Day 2 of strike: Thousands of nurses return to picket line Tuesday

The picket lines have been active since 7 a.m., and they're still going now.

Nurses are fighting for several things, including pay, more staffing and better safety protocols in place.

Wednesday is their last day of a planned three-day strike, and they hope it's enough to make a deal happen.

Outside of United and Children's Minnesota Hospitals in St. Paul, nurse Cash Rodamaker says it's more important to him that the hospital addresses staffing issues over more pay.

"We're just overloaded right now. we're taking on more patients than we can give truly adequate, holistic care to," he said. "It'd be nice if it paid a little better, but that's not really why I'm out here. I want to take care of patients well. i want them to feel like we have time for them."

Nurse Shelagh Crandall wants to see the hospitals supporting families more.

"We don't have family leave, so we don't have maternity leave, even though we work in a hospital. Also family leave should include adoption and paternity leave because we have male nurses, and they should have leave as well," she said.

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan joined the picket line and Gov. Tim Walz showed up as well, both to give support to the nurses.

The nurses say they hope three days without them will be enough to get them back to the table and make a deal. If it's not, the nurses union would have to vote on another strike authorization with a 10-day notice.

Gov. Tim Walz showed up to the picket lines outside of United Hospital and Children's Minnesota in St. Paul Tuesday afternoon, on the second day of a planned three-day nurses' strike.

WCCO's Marielle Mohs asked whether he plans to intervene in the negotiations as former Gov. Mark Dayton did during the Allina Nurse strike in 2016.

"There's a process for doing this, collectively bargaining, and negotiations happen. There's national labor relation boards," Walz said. "We're at the first part of this. We're certainly encouraging both sides to get back to the table to get this thing worked out because what we know is Minnesotans have some of the best health care in the world. We know that nurses in Minnesota are some of the most respected professions. We want them to work out their differences and get back to the table."

Around 15, 000 Minnesota nurses from the Twin Cities and Duluth are heading back to the picket line Tuesday morning. 

At Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis, a coach bus filled with traveling nurses was seen arriving as striking nurses were setting up outside. 

Striking nurses say their traveling counterparts can't provide the same quality of care they can.

"They don't know our policies [or] our protocols," said Angela Becchetti, a registered nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. "They don't know where stuff is, how does our unit work, how do our patients work and you can't learn that in a couple days of training and that's an issue for us."

Job postings circulating online for traveling nurses from Medical Staffing Solutions advertise pay starting at just under $8,000 for this strike specifically. That pay covers the three days of the strike in addition to two days of training. Other advertisements on Indeed list positions at more than $10,000 for the duration of the strike.

By the numbers, traveling nurses could be making just under $1,600 per day on the lower end of the advertised spectrum.

The striking nurses have asked for a 30% wage increase over three years, with the first year increase at 13%. Abbott nurses say that if they got that pay bump, it would mean base pay for a starting nurse would be $34.99 an hour. 

With nurses working an average 12-hour day, Becchetti said new nurses would only be making $419.18 a day, or about a quarter of what traveling nurses are making a day during each day of the strike.

The hospital has said it can't afford what nurses are asking for, citing multimillion dollar losses during the pandemic. Hosptital officials have instead countered with a 12% increase over three years.

An Allina spokesperson said aside from having to reschedule some elective surgeries and procedures, things for the most part are running smoothly as they can despite the strike.

Day 2 of the Minnesota nurses strike officially began at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

WCCO photographer Nick Boeke captured a timelapse of nurses setting up outside Abbott Northwestern hospital in Minneapolis. 

As of Monday afternoon, the two sides in the nursing strike are said to remain very far apart, and there are no new talks scheduled.

Nurses have walked out of 15 hospitals, including three in Duluth and 12 in the Twin Cities metro area.

Inside the hospitals, temporary replacement nurses are caring for patients.

The striking nurses are asking for up to a 30% pay hike spread over three years. The hospitals are countering with 12% over three years.

But nurses insist this is not about money. From the leadership on down nurses say staffing is no longer safe for either nurses or patients.

"We want assurances in our contract that if a nurse says their assignment is unsafe that we are not disciplined. We have had nurses that have been sent home for refusing an unsafe assignment," nurse union president Mary Turner said.

The hospitals say the nurses' demands are unrealistic and they point to some hospital losses in revenue recently. M Health Fairview, for example, says it lost $163 million in the first half of the year.

This three-day strike will be over Thursday and the goal is to get the sides back to the table. Nurses wont say what happens next if no deal is reached. 

The Minnesota Nurses Association ended day of its three-day strike and members will return to the picket line Tuesday at 7 a.m.

As the sun set Monday, nurses at Abbott Northwestern danced as a local musicians in the group Brass Solidarity played renditions of "Lean on Me" and "We're Not Going to Take It." Drivers honked and cheered as they drove by.

"It's just been great energy from the nurses building each other up," said Kelley Anaas, a registered nurse Abbott Northwestern. "We've had community support and lots of other union members showing up to support us because our jobs might all be different but ultimately what we want is the same: we don't want corporations taking over what heath care looks like in Minnesota."

Two sticking points for nurses are higher wages and more input on staffing levels. This, they say, will prevent burnout and ensure patients aren't shortchanged in their care.

"We're serious about what we need to keep doing our jobs and what it's going to take to keep nurses inside of hospitals instead of looking for work elsewhere," Anaas said.

A Minnesota Department of Health survey found 19% of nurses last year said they plan to leave the profession in five years, which is an increase from pre-pandemic. There are more jobs unfilled than there were in 2019, too.

"We're in a crisis where we need staff," said Tracey Dittrich, a nurse at Children's Minnesota in Minneapolis who's worked there for more than two decades. "There are nurses in Minnesota-they just don't want to work in these conditions."

Fifteen hospitals are impacted with 15,000 nurses participating in the strike. Children's Minnesota, Fairview, Methodist Hospital, and North Memorial Health in a joint statement said pay increases of up to 30% aren't attainable.

"Increases like this would cost hundreds of millions of dollars across Twin Cities Hospitals and are not economically feasible or responsible to our community members who would ultimately pay the price," the hospitals said.

Anaas said the nurses union started high with its proposal on wage increase and hopes to meet somewhere in the middle.

Allina Health said it's rescheduled a limited number of non-emergent appointments to ensure patient safety.

"As we have said all along, strikes do not benefit anyone and the only path to reaching agreement is through negotiations," the health care system said in a statement. "At the conclusion of MNA's strike, we are hopeful that they will be ready to engage in serious negotiations with the assistance of a federal mediator to help the parties remain at the table until a deal is reached."