Updated at 1:10 p.m. Dec. 27 with details from the picket line
Nurses at SSM Health St. Louis University Hospital walked off the job Wednesday as negotiations between the nurses union and hospital executives stalled.
The hospital and members of the National Nurses Organizing Committee have been attempting to hammer out a deal since May. The union’s contract expired in June.
Nurses began the strike at 7 a.m. and picketed in front of the hospital on South Grand Boulevard. The 48-hour action will wrap up Friday morning. The strike marks the second the union has called in four months.
Union members say they want the hospital to commit to putting safer staffing levels in place and to focus on training and retaining nurses, instead of hiring nurses from temporary staffing agencies.
“We appreciate that [temporary workers] are there, we really do, " said Kellie Allen, a cardiothoracic nurse who has worked at the hospital for eight years. “However, there's tasks that they can't perform.”
Several dozen nurses and supporters stood in the cold rain during a rally Wednesday shortly after the start of the strike, holding signs and chanting.
“I’ve come out here even though it's raining,” said Earline Shephard, a cardiac cath nurse who has worked at the hospital for more than 16 years. “I would come out here for snow, anything.”
Shephard said she is one of two permanent staff nurses on the floor of the cardiac cath lab. The rest come from temporary staffing agencies and aren’t as familiar with the hospital’s procedures and policies, she said.
Nurses are burned out and overworked, said Shephard, who is a member of the bargaining committee.
“The nurses are calling for [SSM] to recruit nurses and retain the nurses that we have, and just hire full-time staff instead of outsourcing nursing jobs to an agency,” she said. “We’re spread so thin. And some nurses go home crying because they felt that they knew that they could do better, but didn't have the time to do it.”
Nurses want input on staffing decisions written into the new contract, said Danny Ritter, the union’s Midwest coordinator.
The bargaining team has conducted more than two dozen sessions with administrators over seven months, he said, and there hasn’t been enough progress.
“When sides get this far apart, strikes become kind of the natural consequence,” he said. “We're hoping though, that the striker wakes them up and they come back to the table negotiating good faith.”
SSM Health officials in a statement criticized the national union for focusing on authorizing a strike instead of continuing to negotiate worker pay. The health system wanted to engage in union talks, they said in a statement, but the bargaining committee’s work has stalled, with frequent stops and starts.
“Unfortunately, NNOC leaders have now chosen to halt progress again, preferring to focus their efforts on a strike rather than reaching a contract that would finally get the nurses the increase they deserve,” the officials said in the statement.
Meanwhile, the health system is falling behind others when it comes to compensation and benefits, the officials said.
SSM’s practice of hiring agency nurses is an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of the union, transplant clinic nurse Maddi O’Leary said in a statement.
“SSM seems to be dragging this process out and encouraging the decertification of our union," O'Leary said. "This is why we are striking.”
The union gave 10 days' notice before Wednesday’s action. The hospital has prepared by hiring other staff members to fill in for strikers.
