With picket signs that read “Greed kills/nurses heal” and “Safe staffing saves lives,” nurses at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a 24-hour strike against systematic understaffing July 6. The same day nearly 1,200 nurses struck two Ascension hospitals in Wichita, Kansas. The actions are part of a wave of protests and strikes by nurses on the front lines fighting for safety for both patients and nurses, and better working conditions.
There have been more than 30 strikes in the U.S. by nurses in 2026, and some 130 over the last five years.
Ascension, one of the largest health systems in the country, has for years aggressively slashed staffing in its zeal for profits, setting an example other hospital bosses have adopted.
The company was created in 1999 through a merger of two hospital networks, many where facilities had been founded by nuns who ministered to the poor. Organized as a supposed nonprofit, which lets Ascension avoid millions in taxes each year, management set its sights on cutting costs, turning to its biggest expense — labor.
“Their whole approach to the finances was right out of the Wall Street playbook,” William Weeks, a retired executive of an Ascension five-hospital chain in Oklahoma, told the New York Times. Ascension bosses were proud of what they did, with two of its executives giving a presentation at a 2015 industry conference titled “Successful Labor Optimization Efforts.” They boasted they had saved the corporation nearly $500 million in just three years.
As part of this drive, the chain laid off thousands in 2013. The more they cut costs, the higher Ascension’s executives’ salaries grew. The company posted a profit of $608 million in the six months ending Dec. 31, while Ascension CEO Joseph Impicciche was paid an obscene $12,281,151 in 2025.
The losers in this setup are the patients and the overworked, understaffed nurses trying to care for them.
Many of the nearly 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., the majority run as so-called nonprofits, have cut staffing so close to the bone that when COVID-19 hit in 2020, already horrible conditions spiraled out of control. At Washington state’s St. Michael Medical Center, run by CommonSpirit Health, things got so bad in October that year the nurse in charge of the emergency room called 911 dispatchers, who sent fire depart-ment personnel to help care for patients.
In 2018, Ascension acquired Saint Joseph Medical Center, the only hospital in Joliet, Illinois. It employed 791 nurses. By 2022, their numbers had been chopped by 23%.
In 2020 nurses there filed hundreds of complaints with the hospital about conditions. “Every day it’s unsafe staffing!!!” one nurse wrote, underlining “every day” four times. By October 2022, nurses in the emergency room refused to clock in because they were being asked to care for 11 patients each, more than double the recommended four.
At Genesys Hospital outside Flint, Michigan, one of a handful of unionized Ascension hospitals, administrators weren’t in a position to lay off workers. Instead, they froze hiring in 2018. By 2022, the number of nurses there had fallen by 30%.
Bosses demand 16-hour shifts
The pandemic exposed the results of Ascension bosses’ profit-driven cuts, as patients spent hours on gurneys waiting for care and surgeries were delayed. To keep things running, Genesys bosses demanded nurses work 16-hour shifts. When some refused, managers threatened to fire them, or wrote them up, claiming their refusal “is not in line with our value of dedication.”
Instead of hiring more nurses, Ascension started deploying robots to watch patients at risk of falling or who suffered from dementia. Nurses told the Times that many of the patients were confused by the disembodied voices coming from the robots, which the nurses called “sitters on a stick.”
One Genesys nurse, who had nearly 30 years of overall healthcare experience, told the Times the turning point for her was when a patient died in a manner she believed was a result of unsafe patient-nurse staffing ratios. “Can I say that it was 100% a staffing issue?” she asked. “I cannot say that. But if you’re going to ask me what my gut instinct as a nurse of 26 years is, yes, I think that it probably was.”
In January 2024, National Nurses United — the largest union of registered nurses in the country — said Ascension, one of the wealthiest hospital chains, had cut a quarter of its labor and delivery units with a disproportionate impact on low-income, Black and Latino communities, to increase profits further.
Driven by these conditions, there have been at least seven strikes at Ascension-affiliated hospitals since 2021, with demands for safe staffing at the center of all of them. Over the last four years more than 2,500 nurses at Ascension hospitals across the country have joined the union.
In June 2023, nearly 2,000 registered nurses fighting for their first union contract held one-day strikes in Texas and Kansas at three Ascension hospitals. The strikes were the largest nurses strikes in the history of both states.
In Wichita at Via Christi St. Francis and Via Christi St. Joseph hospitals, management, instead of hiring nurses had a policy of “floating” nurses, that is, sending them to units they may not be trained for. In Austin, Texas, the bosses wanted nurses with as little as 18 months’ experience to be sent to take charge of labor and delivery units.
When the hospitals didn’t respond to their first strike, the nurses went out again in December 2023. In both cases, Ascension management locked the nurses out for three days, blocking them from returning to work.
Despite the bosses’ actions, nurses at all three hospitals ratified their first-ever union contracts early in 2024.