I’m an RN in Minnesota and I’m preparing for a potential strike. Why?
Well, in Minnesota, nurses unions have been negotiating for almost two months on expired contracts, and across the state 15,000 nurses are working with expired contracts at this time (1).
Negotiations are moving slowly between the nurse’s reps and the hospital’s reps. There are a couple of sticking points, including staffing and vacation language. But, the two issues nearest and dearest to me personally are wages and paid family leave.
Minnesota Nurse’s Association is attempting to add a paid family leave to the union contract. Currently, there is not an option for nurse’s to have paid short term disability/maternity leave at HealthPartners’ union hospital. That is unacceptable. Target offers retail employees 10-12 weeks paid leave after giving birth (2).
MNA is also attempting to negotiate a wage increase that beats inflation and recognizes what nurses have gone through the past two years. The highest offer from the hospital so far is 4% for 2022 with no retroactive pay. Mind you, inflation is 9% these days (3). Not only does that raise not actually increase buying power, it doesn’t actually even salary out with the rate everything else is going up. That is unacceptable.
To bring a little equity lens to the table, let’s look at top executive pay. Andrea Walsh, CEO of HealthPartners has historically received raises as high as 52% in a year (4) AND since 2018 the org has been paying a 21% excess tax after the first million of wages for each of its top 5 paid people — as a nonprofit this is considered irresponsibly high compensation (5). She alone makes over $2 million, so that’s a lot of tax. Also, HP has actually been doing darn well with revenue since 2022’s rebound of health services (6). Yet negotiators tell union members a 15% raise is “out of the stratosphere.”
Now, one could argue that Andrea hasn’t seen raises like that since the pandemic, and they would be right. Walsh’s total compensation increased a mere 3% in 2020, which is the latest data available (7). BUT in 2020 the organization actually pledged to DECREASE her compensation by 40% in April when furloughs were announced (8). This means there is a 43% discrepancy between what happened and what was promised. I’d personally like to argue it may as well be a 43% raise.
TLDR: My CEO is literally a millionaire and I don’t have paid maternity leave. And, ironically, I am an RN on the maternity ward.
Sources:
*(2) https://www.hrdive.com/news/target-expands-family-leave-backup-care-for-hourly-workers/556601/
*(3) https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/INFLATION/lbpgneoyqvq/index.html
*(4) https://m.startribune.com/minnesota-nonprofit-companies-top-100-for-2019/566290571/?clmob=y&c=n
*(5) https://m.startribune.com/health-care-groups-pay-tax-on-ceo-pay/567084542/?clmob=y&c=n