Unionized Women & Infants caregivers participate in an informational picket Nov. 12, 202, to protest chronic staffing shortages, double shifts, and what they say has been a lack of respect and failure by management to bargain in good faith. (Courtesy of SEIU 1199)
An expired labor contract and stalled negotiations mean frontline workers at Women & Infants Hospital are gearing up for a strike, union leaders announced last week.
Members of SEIU 1199 New England almost unanimously voted in support of a labor stoppage, with 99% voting to OK the strike, slated to begin Thursday, Dec. 12. Soon-to-be striking workers will demand that hospital administrators address staffing shortages, stagnating wages and rising living costs — a dissatisfaction captured in a union survey which found 68% of the 347 respondents feeling stress over “making ends meet.”
“So many of the healthcare workers — not just the nurses, but the respiratory therapists, those who clean the rooms, the dietary staff there, there are too many to mention — no one took this lightly,” said Nancy Chandley Adams, a lactation nurse at the hospital, in an interview Friday.