PORTLAND, Ore. — After a six-week strike, 5,000 nurses at eight Providence hospitals across the state approved new contracts Feb. 24, ending what the Oregon Nurses Association described as the largest health care workers strike in state history.
Calling the agreements “a major victory for front-line caregivers,” the union said they include wage increases of 20% to 42% over three years, with an immediate raise of 16% to 22%. The contracts will also improve the quality of patient care by allowing nurses more time to work with the sickest patients.
The contracts don’t guarantee break and meal times, a major demand of the union, but nurses will now automatically receive an hour of pay for each one that they miss.
The nurses went on strike Jan. 10 after months of negotiations. In what Dr. Ben LeBlanc, chief executive of Providence Medical Group, described as “unprecedented,” the nurses were joined by dozens of doctors. LeBlanc complained on the first day of the strike “only 10% of physicians are at work today.”
Some 83% of the nurses voted down the hospitals’ first proposed contracts. They “didn’t address the issues we are concerned about and some of it was almost insulting,” Michael Joyce, a surgery nurse at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center near Portland, told the Militant on the picket line.
Joyce said the strike won a lot of solidarity. “When I walked into the Safeway grocery store the other day with my union button on I got support from the workers there.”
Strikers told the Militant that many other union members walked their picket line, including Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 364, Teamsters, United Steelworkers, members of the SMART-TD rail conductors union and a teachers union. Union workers from New Seasons Market also showed up in solidarity. They were on strike at the same time, demanding reinstatement of a fellow worker who was unjustly fired.
The new agreements include retroactive pay for nurses with contracts that expired before December 2024.
It’s meaningful that the new agreement refers to the money as back pay, Virginia Smith, a nurse, said at a press conference. The one nurses voted down had offered just a “ratification bonus.”
“Even though that feels like words, it’s not words. It’s meaningful, when you’ve worked and you’re owed pay,” she said.
As the strike battle took place, 2,300 nurses at three other Portland-area hospitals voted overwhelmingly to join the Oregon Nurses Association.