According to its website, the OPEIU represents over 100,000 workers in the US and Canada. Clemens, Michigan, in neighboring Macomb County. Local 40 also represents registered nurses and service workers at McLaren-Macomb Hospital, a 288-bed training hospital in Mt. The OPEIU has no shortage of other workers to call on for joint action. This is a deliberate policy on the part of the union bureaucracy, a standard operating procedure in most such strikes, and not only in health care. The OPEIU has not attempted to coordinate joint action between these and other workers at the hospital, or with workers at other Ascension facilities in the area. The purpose of the three-day strike is to isolate and exhaust the registered nurses and radiology techs at Ascension Providence. Such phony appeals for the capitalists to do the right thing serve only to demoralize and betray workers. Before even taking a strike authorization vote, Local 40’s bargaining team wrote their letter begging the hospital’s Board of Trustees to make management see reason. RNs and RTs at Ascension Providence should put no faith in the OPEIU bureaucracy to fight for their interests.
The OPEIU has called the strike, not from the perspective of resisting a broader attack on the working class, but to allow the nurses to blow off steam and to enforce the union’s claim on dues money from the workforce. Companies may use extraordinary wages now to draw workers into this gig economy, but such wages are a temporary expedient and will quickly be phased out once an even minimal staff is in place. The drive to casualize the healthcare workforce is a broad, worldwide initiative with the objective to divide healthcare workers and prevent, above all, rank-and-file organizing among them. However, this is not an attack directed at the OPEIU. The union asserts that the hospital is doing this deliberately to limit the number of union nurses on staff. According to the bargaining team’s letter, the hospital will hire temporary RNs for as much as $100 per hour, citing the critical shortage. While Ascension will not disclose wages at other locations, the union claims to have paystub evidence proving that RNs and RTs at other Ascension hospitals make wages that are “significantly higher” than the top wage in the third year of Providence’s current contract proposal.Īmong the ULP charges filed by the union against Ascension Providence is one that implies a conspiracy by the hospital to casualize its workforce. According to the letter, the wages paid at Providence are lower than at other Ascension hospitals in the area. A poster for the strike made by the union also names “lack of patient safety, recruitment, retention, respect” as other reasons for the strike.Īn undated letter, apparently written before the strike vote, from the local’s bargaining team to the hospital’s Board of Trustees provides further details of what workers are confronting at Ascension Providence.Īs in hospitals throughout the state and the country, Providence is constantly losing staff due to abysmally low wages. They allege that the hospital is not cooperating in negotiations and is engaging in unfair labor practices (ULP).
The OPEIU has been negotiating with Ascension Providence since last year. The hospital is owned by Ascension Health, a Catholic nonprofit. According to tax records available on ProPublica, the hospital treated 11,034 patients in the fiscal year 2022 and had 1,619 employees. While the union has not published the exact number of workers it represents, Ascension Providence is a large hospital with 226 beds.
They turned the strike into a four-day lockout, announcing that the contract they settled for nurses from a staffing agency required they work as strikebreakers for at least four days. Ascension responded to the workers with a provocation. The workers voted at the end of August by 99 percent for a three-day strike due to multiple allegations of unfair labor practices at the hospital. A meeting of the nurses before the strike.
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