U. of C. Medical Center nurses vote to strike if bargaining fails

Registered nurses at the University of Chicago Medical Center voted to strike late Thursday if further bargaining efforts fail.

The nurses voted 95 percent yes to strike one day only, if necessary, said Jan Rodolfo, a spokeswoman for the nurses’ union, National Nurses United. A date has not been set for a strike.

The union will resume negotiations with the hospital on Friday.

U. of C. medical center officials say they will have a contingency plan in place to ensure patient care continues smoothly if a strike does happen. They did not provide details.

At issue, the nurses’ union said, is the medical center’s refusal to address unsafe staffing levels and their proposals to replace the clinically competent RN “charge nurses” on each unit with managers focused on budgetary concerns; and to increase the requirement that nurses who usually work day shift be forced to unsafely “rotate” their schedule and work night shifts during any given week.

“When nurses have more patients than they can safely care for, it puts our patients at risk. It’s just that simple,” Brigitt Manson, a pediatric registered nurse at the U. of C. medical center, said in a union’ statement.

In a statement, the hospital said: “We are extremely disappointed with the outcome of this vote, which authorizes the NNU to call a strike at any time and for any length of time — without going back to nurses for a vote. We feel this vote is premature as our nurses have not yet seen the full outcome of negotiations.”

Rodolfo, though, emphasized that the nurses’ vote was only for one day, not as the hospital says, “for any length of time.”

The U. of C. medical center also noted that there has not been a strike in roughly 40 years, and they remain “committed to a constructive dialogue and good-faith negotiations to reach a contract that is in the best interest of our patients and nurses.”