Nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford ratified their first union contract on Friday, bringing an end to a three-year dispute over working conditions and wages.
For much of the pandemic, nurses at St. Luke’s, the city’s largest employer, earned less than their peers at nearby hospitals, according to the union. The Massachusetts Nurses Association reported last year that nurses with 15 years of experience earned an average of $42 an hour at St. Luke’s — about $10 less per hour than nurses at unionized hospitals in nearby Plymouth, Taunton and Cape Cod.
St. Luke’s also serves an especially vulnerable population. New Bedford is the least vaccinated city in Massachusetts, and the Omicron variant brought a record-breaking surge of patients into St. Luke’s ten months after a vaccine that largely prevents severe cases became publicly available.
Those conditions have contributed to a serious labor shortage at St. Luke’s. There are 150 unfilled nursing positions at the hospital, with a staff of about 700 nurses covering the extra work.
Deb Falk, an emergency room nurse and union leader who retired this month, said nurses were sometimes mandated to work 16-hour shifts when staffing wore thin. Falk said nurses at St. Luke’s also saw the number of patients they cared for rise dramatically during the pandemic.
“There’s not a nursing shortage,” Falk said. “There is a shortage of nurses willing to work the way in which we’re working.”
Nurses at St. Luke’s began the process of unionizing with the Massachusetts Nurses Association years before the coronavirus brought record numbers of patients through the hospital’s doors, while simultaneously thinning the ranks of nurses willing to work in such stressful conditions.
But negotiations for the nurses’ first union contract stalled when the virus forced the community hospital to deal with unprecedented challenges.
Frustrations over the delay almost derailed the entire effort. In December 2020, a group of nurses organized a decertification election that came just nine votes short of kicking the union out of St. Luke’s.
But union organizers managed to rally, with strong support from local politicians. On Feb. 17, nurses reached a tentative contract agreement with St. Luke’s parent organization, Southcoast Health, a nonprofit that manages the region’s largest hospital network.
Nurses voted in favor of ratifying that contract agreement on Friday, traveling through sleet and snow to cast ballots at a hotel on New Bedford’s waterfront.
Karen Corbett, a maternity nurse and union leader, said the contract creates a system of accountability for enforcing staffing minimums in every hospital department.
“The biggest thing with a contract is that it’s legally binding,” Corbett said.
A new wage scale will also ensure that nurses of equal experience earn equal pay, with guaranteed annual raises.
Jacqueline Somerville, an executive and chief nursing officer at Southcoast Health, issued a statement calling the contract “fair and equitable.”
“We are incredibly grateful for our nurses and frontline staff for their ongoing dedication to caring for our community,” Somerville said.
St. Luke’s is the second of Southcoast’s three hospitals where nurses have unionized. The holdout, Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, is expected to see a more focused unionization effort among nurses in the coming months.
Emerson Tatelbaum, an intern from the UMass Dartmouth Journalism Alliance, contributed to this report.
Ben Berke can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org. Follow him on Twitter @BenBerke6.
