Marlena Pellegrino remembers well the day she and other St. Vincent Hospital nurses went on strike. What she didn’t know at the time was that the walk-out would make history as the longest nurse’s strike to ever take place in Massachusetts.
“We went on strike March 8, 2021,” she said. “We were on strike 301 days.”
That strike was over working conditions. Nurses at St. Vincent wanted limits on the number of patients they were responsible for on each shift. The agreement, signed in January 2022, capped patient loads at five — with fewer patients per nurse in such critical care areas as the ICU. But Pellegrino said the hospital violates those contract terms every single day.
“There has been no labor peace at all in the entire three years since the strike ended,” she said. “That hospital, the building, the feeling is unrecognizable to any of us who have worked there for any amount of time. It’s like a black hole. There’s no staff, the supplies are limited, there is barely any management at all.”