Union Nurses Support You, Let’s Support Union Nurses
by Anne Jackson, past president of the UM Professional Nurse Council, a local of the Michigan Nurses Association
The 6,500 nurses at University of Michigan hospital are in negotiations for a new contract as ours expires June 30. We are looking for community and labor support. Join us at the Regents Meeting at U of M Dearborn, 3pm Thursday, May 19, Fairlane Center at 19000 Hubbard Drive, adjacent to UM-Dearborn’s main campus on Evergreen, to show that you support nurses and patients! A show of community support can make a difference to these elected officials!
Where We Have Been
More than two years into the meat grinder of the covid pandemic, nurses (all healthcare workers, actually) are burnt out. Many are leaving the profession altogether. At the beginning we had to literally fight for our lives to get proper PPE. Our employer did not allow us to wear an N95 mask with every covid patient until we won a MIOSHA complaint in July 2020 — five months into the deadly pandemic! Many healthcare workers have died — we don’t know how many because no one is officially keeping track.
What is worse: Corporate management in health care freaked out when they had to cancel lucrative elective procedures due to the lack of PPE at the beginning of the pandemic. This made most health care institutions, Michigan Medicine included, implement draconian austerity measures. I will never forget when the financial guy gleefully talked about “opportunities,” meaning layoffs. We lost 788 support staff — whose work then had to be picked up by the nurses.
Next, nurses started leaving in massive numbers for lucrative travel jobs, they retired early, or they left nursing altogether. Our Chief Nurse will tell you that everything is fine because we have hired roughly 800 nurses in 2021. What she does not tell you is we lost 680 nurses in that same period. At the peak we were short 524 nurses.
Many of the new nurses are not making it through orientation, partly due to poor training during the pandemic and partly due to short staffing. The nurses left do not have the ability to train new nurses properly while they are busy doing everyone else’s jobs. The hospital is short of staff in every category: clerks, techs, pharmacists, pharmacy techs, social workers, guest services, security, you name it, we are short.
For extra fun, the nurses’ union, part of the Michigan Nurses Association for 47 years, underwent a raid by the teachers union in the middle of a pandemic, trying to get our members to switch unions! Not only were we fighting for our lives, we were fighting each other. Our employer used this at every opportunity to drive wedges between us.
After almost a year-long battle, our nurses voted to stay with the Michigan Nurses Association. Much healing needs to take place after a year of fighting each other.
Where We Are Now
We are eight weeks into negotiations. On day one, our employer served us a 143-page rewrite of our 273-page, 47-year-old contract and have barely budged off their initial offer since.
They have spent a lot of time trying to convince our team the institution is destitute; it is not. The hospital runs on a significant amount of overtime, including mandatory overtime.
Mandatory overtime is when a nurse expecting to go home and rest after an 8-to-12-hour shift is mandated to stay an additional four hours, or mandated to come in four hours early for the next day’s 12-hour shift, which often means coming back to the hospital at 3am after getting off at 7:30pm.
When mandated in person, nurses are threatened with “patient abandonment” if they refuse to stay, without any regard to whether they are in a safe condition to continue working. We have had nurses get in car accidents on the way in to a mandatory shift because they did not have enough time between shifts to get proper rest.
Despite running the hospital on overtime, the numbers do not show it, because most units are running short by one, two, five, sometimes 10 nurses per shift in the big units. The hospital is saving bucket loads of money by using overtime instead of hiring more nurses. The patients are NOT safe. The nurses are not safe and they know it.
We have a form called Assignment Despite Objection (ADO) that we fill out whenever we have an unsafe assignment: too many really sick patients at once, working mandatory overtime, no meal or break, the charge nurse taking an assignment instead of being available to help in an emergency. Nurses have filed thousands of these since they were put in place in March 2021.
How We Are Organizing
Nurses are organizing internally by wearing red t-shirts, shoelaces, buttons, badge pulls, and scrunchies. One of our buttons was forbidden by management; in our last contract campaign they banned certain t-shirts. We are circulating a bargaining petition and gathering signatures from as many nurses as possible.
Nurses are filling out the ADOs at an alarming rate, 115 so far in the month of May. We have a union table in the cafeteria on “wear red Wednesdays” staffed by nurse activists and are rounding and flyering with negotiations updates every Friday.
Our contract is with elected officials: the Regents of the University of Michigan, of which Michigan Medicine is a part. Many of these regents have accepted election help from unions to gain their positions. The expectation is that they will return the favor and assist us when it comes to contract negotiations.
I have recently learned that they are going to need some convincing, as they have fallen for the hospital’s cries of poverty — a hospital that is offering contracts to scabs of $8,000-$13,000 per week in the event of a work stoppage. The top staff nurse salary at Michigan Medicine is roughly $2,000 per week. So how is it they do not have the money to bring nurses’ wages up to where they can fill the multitude of vacancies to safely staff the hospital again?
We have the most complex patient population in the state, where any and all rare diagnoses can be recognized and treated. We have an incredible nursing staff — because we are a union hospital where nurses at the bedside have a voice for their patients’ safety.
In a world where hospitals have adopted the just-in-time supply chain from the auto industry, now more than ever patients need the nurses’ voice to assure they are safe. We need to maintain our 47-year contract and make improvements to be able to continue to fight for the safety of our community and our patients.
The beaten down nursing workforce needs your help to convince our “not for profit” (in name only) employer that a strong nursing contract will result in a strong health system now and in the future.
DSA members are asked to join the picket outside the U of M Regents meeting Thursday, May 19 at 3 pm at U of M Dearborn. Nurses will be making comments inside at the meeting. Meet at Fairlane Center at 19000 Hubbard Drive, adjacent to UM-Dearborn’s main campus on Evergreen.
Those who can come to Ann Arbor, we expect a bigger gathering of nurses and supporters at the Regents’ meeting on June 16. Stay tuned for details.
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