Thousands of Providence nurses strike at six hospitals this week • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Thousands of nurses at six Oregon hospitals walked off the job this week, beginning a three-day strike, the largest of its kind in the state’s history.
By 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, hundreds of nurses were already on the picket lines outside hospitals from Medford to Portland. The strike comes amid deadlocked collective bargaining between the Oregon Nurses Association, which represents more than 3,000 nurses at the six hospitals, and Providence Health & Services, a nonprofit organization that is Oregon’s leading hospital group and the largest employer in the Portland area.
Nurses at all hospitals voted to stop work, and the union gave Providence 10 days’ notice. Nurses union officials say the issue is about competitive wages and affordable health insurance. To prepare for the strike, Providence officials hired traveling nurses and urged patients to continue showing up for care and treatment. Gary Walker, a Providence spokesman, said Tuesday the transition has been smooth at all six hospital locations.
The nurses work at Providence St. Vincent in southwest Portland, Providence Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Providence Medford, Providence Newberg, Providence Hood River and Providence Milwaukie. Nurses at the company’s other hospital — Providence Portland Medical Center in northeast Portland — will work as usual since they completed their contracts last year. Labor contracts are negotiated separately with each facility.
At Providence Newberg, Beth Lepire, a registered nurse at the hospital’s birthing center, arrived before 6 a.m. and joined her colleagues on strike, holding signs that read, “Better pay, nurses will stay” and “Recruit, retain, respect nurses.”
Lepire, who is also a member of the nurse negotiating team at Newberg Hospital, said the small community must rely on suburban Salem and Portland to meet its workforce needs. And hospitals in Salem and Portland can provide more, making workforce retention a challenge, Lepire said.
“We want to stay here because we love our community hospital,” Lepire said. “We love our doctors. We love the people we work with. We think we take really good care of our people, but it’s hard to keep people here. It’s hard to keep these nurses because they want to go somewhere else and get better paid to take care of their families.”
Lepire and other striking nurses committed to striking outside their hospitals for three shifts.
“We’re going to have quite a few people here on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, nurses and their families and some other supporters on the sidewalks in front of the hospital,” Lepire said.
At her hospital, she said, nearly 95 percent of nurses voted to strike. Lepire said she believes managers did not expect such a level of support.
“I think they were shocked by that, and then by seeing us in such large numbers outside the hospital,” she said. “I hope we get them to understand that this is really important for their staff. If they want to keep and retain the nurses that they had there, they really need to change some things in our contract.”
Hospital reacts to strike
Providence said in a statement that it was “fully prepared for the strike” and was working with a nationally recognized staffing firm to hire experienced nurses for the strike. This includes trained nurses with specializations, the statement said.
The substitute nurses are “extensively vetted,” Providence said, and 97 percent of them have at least seven years of experience.
Providence officials said each of the six hospitals received a bid with increases of about 10% in the first year of the contract.
In the run-up to the strike, Providence officials accused the union of attempting to “disrupt access to health care and the delivery of medical supplies at Providence, Oregon hospitals.”
Myrna Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Nurses Association, said that accusation is false. “It appears that Providence is trying to distract from the reasons why more than 3,000 Providence nurses have called for the largest nurses strike in Oregon history,” Jensen said in an email. “This strike is taking place because Providence continues to ignore its nurses on important issues such as safe staffing, quality and affordable health care, and market-based wages that would help recruit and retain nurses.”
Stalemate in personnel law
Another point of contention: the Oregon Safe Staffing Law.
The legislature passed the bill and Governor Tina Kotek signed it into law in 2023. Bill 2697 Minimum nurse-to-patient ratios have been established and a procedure has been introduced for hospital staff and management to agree on staffing levels and schedules.
But since then, nurses and Providence management have been unable to agree on staffing plans, and nurses have filed a complaint with the Oregon Health Authority accusing Providence management of failing to comply with the new law.
A Providence spokesman previously said the nurses’ union wanted to use staffing ratios from expired plans instead of legal staffing requirements.
The Oregon Nurses Association represents 20,000 nurses and other health care workers statewide.
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