Impasse in contract talks may lead to Baystate Franklin nurses strike

GREENFIELD — Nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center say that if hospital administration does not come to the table to negotiate on Friday, they will be issuing a strike notice.

“They refused to meet us at the table in the last two sessions, face-to-face, and have been shuttling everything through the federal mediator. We feel really strongly that we should meet like the colleagues that we are and talk to each other at the table,” said Marissa Potter, an obstetrics nurse at Baystate Franklin and co-chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association Bargaining Committee. “We are eager to get this thing wrapped up, as we are sure they are.”

The nurses union has been negotiating for a new contract with the hospital system since September, and has been working under month-long contract extensions since December, when the previous one expired. On Thursday, nurses and community members in support of the nurses gathered outside Big Y on the Mohawk Trail in hopes of presenting a community petition to management, and getting the petition passed along to Richard Bossie, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Big Y, who also serves on the Baystate Health board of trustees. The petition, which has garnered almost 800 signatures, asks the hospital system to sign a contract that gives nurses higher pay and maintains nurse-patient ratios, without using non-union float nurses.

Due to Big Y’s solicitation policy, store security informed the nurses that they were unable to accept the petition, and the nurses would need to leave the property. Potter said she understood Big Y employees were just doing their jobs in asking them to leave, but she hopes their message will still reach Bossie and the Baystate Health board of trustees.

“We don’t want to be out on the street corner making a scene,” Potter said. “Frankly, we would much rather be at work, adequately staffed, adequately paid and adequately health-insured ourselves.”

“I’m very disappointed that the folks at Big Y today, who claim to have ties to the community, refused to take a simple message that we were here to deliver,” said Greenfield Precinct 6 Councilor Patricia Williams. “What we’re saying to the board of Baystate is to settle a fair contract. The folks in my community, the people I represent, deserve quality health care, and in order to get that, you need safe staffing. You need enough nurses at the bedside to take care of the patient.”

Potter said Baystate Health management has refused to address their requests for increased staffing of one additional nurse per shift to cover beds in the hallway of the Emergency Department, and continues to offer wages that are behind what is offered at other hospitals in the region.

According to job postings on the Baystate Health website, nurses at Baystate Franklin are hired with pay ranging from $37.98 to $62.87 an hour, and nurse manager positions are listed with starting salary ranges of $130,977 to $178,048.

The wages listed for positions at Baystate Franklin are lower than those at other Baystate locations. In Palmer, Ware and Springfield, registered nurse positions are listed with a range from $41.82 to $66.30 an hour.

At Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, which is affiliated with Mass General Brigham, there are open nurse positions posted with pay ranging from $41.16 to $71.10 per hour, and at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, nurse positions are listed between $43.41 and $65.54 per hour.

“If they refuse to meet us at the table tomorrow, we have told them that we will issue a strike notice,” Potter said on Thursday. “By law, we have to give them 10 days, and then we would go out for a one- to three-day strike.

“Our intention is never to go out on strike. We’ve worked diligently for more than 20 sessions and we’ve moved tremendously,” Potter continued. “For example, on the two- versus three-year contract, we wanted two years; they wanted three years. We said, ‘How about two and a half years,’ and they simply said no. It’s just one small example of a million larger things we’ve tried to negotiate over that they just will not budge, and that is not the nature of negotiating in good faith.”

Efforts to reach Baystate Health spokesperson Heather Duggan by phone and email were not successful by press time on Thursday.