Minnesota Nurses Ratify New Contract

by James Parks, Jul 7, 2010

After more than three months of tense negotiations that included a 24-hour strike, some 12,000 nurses in Minnesota’s Twin Cities yesterday voted to ratify a new three-year contract with 14 area hospitals. The new pact contains no concessions or give-backs and maintains the pension plan.

Although they did not win new safe staffing language they sought, the nurses maintained safe staffing language already in their contract, in which a nurse has a right to close a unit when it becomes unsafe to admit any more patients. The nurses are members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA), an affiliate of National Nurses United (NNU). 

Cindy Olson, an RN at St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood and a member of the MNA negotiating team, said:

It’s been a long three-plus months, but the nurses I’m talking to tonight have a healthy mixture of relief and resolve. Relief that we finally have a contract in front of us that we could ratify, and resolve to make sure we finish the job when it comes to attaining the safe staffing levels our patients and our profession deserve.

The nurses have been fighting for safe staffing ratios since the early 1990s, Olson said and they will keep fighting.

This was not an all-or-nothing situation. The battle for safe staffing didn’t end with this contract agreement. In many ways, it’s only just beginning.

The MNA is planning to unveil a multi-faceted Safe Staffing Campaign in coming weeks, according to union spokesman John Nemo.

Our nurses are going to stand together like never before inside and outside our hospitals. I think it’s safe to say our nurses are really going to be holding the hospitals’ feet to the fire when it comes to their renewed commitment to openly and collaboratively discussing staffing issues with our nurses.

Olson said that in addition to nurses taking a stronger, more unified stand inside hospitals when it comes to the contract language already in place regarding safe staffing, MNA members also will spend significant time and energy continuing to educate the public and politicians about the issue and what needs to be done. “That’s why we all became nurses in the first place—for our patients,” she said.

I love my patients and I love my families. And I’m not going to stop fighting for them until we get the safe staffing levels in place that they deserve.

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