Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the union representing 4,000 of its nurses have postponed a planned strike after the negotiating nurses agreed to bring the latest hospital offer to all their members.
The breakthrough came after a marathon 13-hour negotiating session Saturday — and just four days before the nurses planned to walk out.
Because of the proposal, nurses will report to work as usual on Wednesday, Oct. 14, and will not picket outside.
It would have been their second strike of the year; Brigham nurses walked out for one day in July, which was followed by a four-day lockout. It was the largest nurses strike in state history.
Just before midnight Saturday, the Massachusetts Nurses Association released a statement saying union leaders were putting the strike on hold, but stopped short of celebrating a deal.
The union said hospital parent company Mass General Brigham “continues to refuse to provide cost of living wage increases, a strategy we believe is intended to break our union, putting patients and the community at risk.”
The union will schedule an in-person vote on the contract offer.
“As a democratic organization, given the complexity of the agreement and the impact of a potential strike on our nurses and the community, the Brigham Nurses’ MNA Committee has decided to postpone the strike to allow the 4,000 Brigham nurses to vote on this offer. Brigham nurses will decide our next steps,” union officials said.
Hospital officials issued a statement calling the proposal their “last, best and final offer.”
“The hospital believes its final proposal reflects the value our nurses bring to patient care while balancing our responsibility to patients, our workforce, and the long-term strength of the hospital,” the statement reads. “We are thankful the MNA has pulled its indefinite strike notice and will allow its members to vote on the hospital’s final offer.”
Nurses would continue to receive the 5% step raises they get for each of their first 20 years on the job. And senior nurses who no longer qualify for step increases would receive 2.5% increases.
The union and the hospital also bargained over health insurance costs and the hospital’s reliance on temporary staff.
Until recently, it appeared as though the strike was on. Hospital officials and union officials were not even meeting to try to broker a deal until the week leading up to the planned strike.
Brigham officials had begun recruiting up to 2,000 temporary nurses to care for patients and keep the hospital open. Now that the strike has been postponed, the hospital will no longer use the temp workers.
The Brigham is one of the busiest medical centers in Massachusetts and a founding member of Mass General Brigham, the state’s biggest hospital network. Throughout the dispute, nurses had targeted the company for paying executives millions of dollars annually while declining to meet the union’s demands for pay raises.
Brigham nurses receive 5% pay increases every year for their first two decades on the job. In addition to these step raises, nurses were seeking across-the-board increases, which hospital officials were not willing to provide.
Hospital leaders argued that Brigham nurses are well compensated, with salaries starting at $86,700 a year, and are paid as much as $220,000 for the most experienced nurses.
In recent days, Democratic elected officials had urged hospital officials to get back to the table and make a deal with nurses.
“Nurses are the backbone of our healthcare system — our loved ones and communities rely on them each and every day,” members of the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation said in a statement this week.
“Our nurses deserve fair contracts that reflect that standard of care. Their voices must be heard.”
The development in negotiations at the Brigham follows a contract deal at Boston Medical Center, which avoided a planned strike at that hospital. That agreement covers nearly 2,000 registered nurses and licensed practical nurses at BMC, represented by 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.
