GREENFIELD — While members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association voted 98% to authorize a one-to-three-day strike if continued bargaining sessions with Baystate Health do not show progress toward reaching a finalized contract, union leader Suzanne Love advised City Council that the union seems to be making headway.
Love specified that Wednesday’s bargaining session resulted in the hospital system agreeing to maintain nurse-patient ratios and abandoning the idea of using non-union “float nurses” who are not local staff.
“We don’t want to go on strike — I want to be really clear about that. I always say striking is more work than work,” Love, a registered nurse at Baystate Franklin Medical Center and co-chair of the MNA Bargaining Committee, told city councilors. “I know how to go to work and be a nurse. That is my shift, I go in, and I hopefully go home on time, but striking is so much more effort and it puts the community at risk.”
Love told City Council that she saw real progress at the 18th bargaining session, held on Wednesday, and she hopes to see that momentum continue toward reaching the union’s goals of securing higher pay, protected sick time, preserving current nurse-patient ratios and using local nurses rather than non-union staff from other locations.
In response, city councilors voted unanimously to adopt a resolution to support “the efforts of the nurses of Baystate Franklin Medical Center in securing a fair and equitable union contract that preserves safe staffing ratios, supports recruitment and retention, and protects access to high-quality local care; and encourages Baystate Health to negotiate in good faith to reach such an agreement.”
“I’m very happy to say that we had major progress in the bargaining. They took that off,” Love said, referring to the hospital’s proposal to use non-union nurses to meet nurse-patient ratios. “We still have work to do. We have two more sessions scheduled and they’ll probably schedule more.”
Baystate Franklin nurse Dawnielle Peck said recent community support helped make a difference in the negotiations and that the nurses are seeking additional support as they continue negotiating toward a new contract. The union’s contract expired in December and the nurses have been operating under contract extensions.
“We have been working since September on this effort. We had a lot of really wonderful support from the community. In particular, we had a picket last week, and a lot of Greenfield residents showed up for that to support their local hospitals and their local nurses,” Peck said. “We had some great movement today in negotiations, but we are asking for more continued support from the City Council and from Greenfield in general to ensure that we get a fair and competitive contact from Baystate.
“It makes me love living and working in Greenfield even more. This is a very scrappy community and a community that has really strong convictions,” Peck continued. “I love living and working here, and having a fair contract from Baystate means that both myself and my co-workers can continue to work in a state knowing that we are being compensated fairly and knowing that we have safe patient-nurse ratios as well. We need community support to reach a final agreement and to make sure that the momentum that we achieved today continues going forward.”
Love said she has worked at Baystate Franklin for 17 years, and she plans to continue working at the hospital until she retires in a few years, but the hospital needs to be able to recruit new nurses, and the way to do that is by increasing the starting pay so it is comparable to what other hospitals in western Massachusetts offer.
“We are currently the lowest-paying hospital for new grads, between 10% and 23% lower in this western part of the state,” Love said. “We need to fix that.”
While Baystate Health spokesperson Heather Duggan could not be reached for comment before press time on Thursday, Duggan said in a statement last week, after the nurses picketed outside Baystate Franklin, that the hospital system and the Massachusetts Nurses Association recently brought the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to the table, and they hope the conflict resolution services agency will help finalize the contract.
“Baystate Franklin Medical Center nurses provide quality and compassionate care to all patients in our community, and we remain committed to negotiating in good faith to reach a fair agreement,” she said last week. “We recently began mediation with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and our ongoing bargaining sessions have continued to be productive.”
City councilors said they are proud of the nurses for standing up and banding together, and especially advocating for nurse-patient ratios, and that they are happy to support a union.
“If you think about what it means to be in a hospital with not enough nurses, it gets real scary,” Precinct 6 City Councilor Patricia Williams said. “I think it’s extremely important to support this. This is for our benefit. They fight every day for our benefit, so we need to stand up for them.”
“I’m incredibly proud of Baystate Franklin for being a unionized workplace,” City Council Vice President John Garrett said, “especially considering the sister hospital down in Springfield is not.”
In addition to support from City Council, a community petition in support of the nurses union had garnered more than 475 signatures as of Thursday morning. In a statement, Marissa Potter, an obstetrics nurse at Baystate Franklin and co-chair of the MNA Bargaining Committee, said she believes the community support will make a difference when they return to the table for continued negotiations with Baystate.
“The City Council’s vote signals wide community support for Baystate Franklin nurses and our patients,” Potter said. “We are eager to work with Baystate to reach a fair agreement that acknowledges how essential nurses are to patient care, our community hospital and our local economy.”
