For the last nine months, conductors on the 9 p.m. Providence-Worcester Railroad train have made it a point to blow the horn every day as the train passes St Vincent Hospital — a gesture of support meant to bolster the spirits of the striking nurses from St. Vincent walking the picket line from 6 a.m. to midnight. Registered nurse Dominique Muldoon told me the picketers listened for the sound, a comfort during what she said was a period of “suffering and sacrifice.” A months-long period that dragged on until mid-December, when Labor Secretary Marty Walsh helped negotiate a tentative agreement: including the nurses’ main demand that they go back to work in their original positions. Muldoon, the co-chair of the local bargaining group of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, emphasized nobody wants to go out on strike, it’s a scary thing, but this was “standing up for what was right and just.”
The St. Vincent nurses’ strike began on March 8 when the nurses protested corporate owner Tenet Healthcare’s plan to reduce the nurse/staff ratio to levels the nurses deemed dangerous to patient safety. Theirs was a “moral strike,” explained Marlena Pellegrino, the other co-chair: not for money, but to be “respected and valued” both for their years of training and their commitment to patient welfare. The picketers — mostly women — were sustained by the support of other essential workers, including the building tradesmen, and those horn-blowing train conductors. And they were frequently joined on the picket line by others: mothers with kids, summer theater workers and Worcester’s interfaith organization, which held four vigils for them.
Many saw the nurses’ fight as bigger than their individual grievances, part of a pandemic-forced fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and employers. Marlena Pellegrino agrees, saying, “COVID shined a light on this,” and she says she hopes employers recognize the shift. As for her group, “Nothing will ever be the same,” she says. “Nurses have found their voices.” And so, it seems, have local workers and those from around the country and the world who reached out in solidarity during the strike. “People are saying no more, we’re not going to take it anymore.”
At nine months and counting, the St. Vincent nurse’s strike is now the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history — more than three months longer than the six-month walkout in 1982 at Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg. If the tentative agreement is ratified, St. Vincent’s nurses will return to the hospital just as coronavirus is surging, fueled by the spread of the omicron variant, and as health care workers across the country are dealing with more and sicker patients. The nurses’ expertise is critical.
The nurses’ union agreed to suspend the hospital picket line through Jan. 4 as a show of good faith after Tenet Healthcare and the union accepted the tentative contract. No more nightly horn blows. Rank-and-file members have spent the last nearly two weeks reviewing the agreement’s details on Zoom and in person, getting ready for today’s scheduled vote to ratify a new contract. Assuming the nurses vote to ratify, they plan a quick return to patients’ bedsides doing the jobs they love and fought to keep. Now it’s time, Dominque Muldoon says, to “let the healing begin.”
