This article has been updated with additional reporting.
Providence Health nurses are going public to blast the contract terms their union negotiated while trying to end Oregon’s largest-ever health care strike.
The level of opposition, coming as voting on the tentative deals began Thursday, could mean strikes continue at at least some of the system's eight hospitals in Oregon.
A “no” vote would not be unprecedented.
Two years ago, citing low staffing, Oregon Nurses Association members resoundingly voted down a tentative agreement for 1,600 nurses reached between union bargainers and management at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, west of Portland.
The new tentative agreements, which stemmed from intervention by Gov. Tina Kotek and a week of intense negotiations, appear to be sparking a similar reaction from nurses who say they’re sick of understaffing and poor benefits. Some opposition was first reported by KGW News.
“It’s awful,” wrote Leesha Vaden, an intensive care nurse at Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center in a comment on Providence’s Oregon Facebook page. “I’m hoping it doesn’t pass. I am voting no.”
A continued strike would likely be bad news for patients. Nurses say care at Providence has suffered with replacement workers staffing them, and some patients agree.
Representatives of the union and Providence declined to comment on the situation. A union announcement stressed a variety of benefits.
The union and Providence announced late Tuesday they had reached tentative agreements for nurses at the health system’s eight hospitals in Oregon. The following day they announced a tentative deal for about 70 doctors working at Providence St. Vincent, who also were on strike.
But on Wednesday, before voting started, initial results of a straw poll held in a Providence nurses’ chat on Facebook indicated respondents were overwhelmingly opposed. According to a screenshot shared with The Lund Report the vote was 299 respondents against the deal to 8 in favor at Providence Portland and 311 to 11 at Providence St. Vincent.
On Thursday, Don Bard, another Willamette Falls intensive care nurse, said he and his wife — a labor and delivery nurse at the same hospital — both voted against ratifying the tentative agreement. "For us it was an easy question," he said.
Concerns persist of low benefits, lagging pay
It’s the hospital nurses that have been most vocal in their concerns that the contracts reached look very similar to offers Providence had been making late last year — only to be rejected by union negotiators.
The complaints they cite include continued high premiums for health coverage offered to Providence workers. Instead, the deal offers a “work group” to discuss those benefits — a Providence proposal that the union previously had rejected.
Another big concern: the contracts don’t include retroactive pay to make the caregivers whole. Instead, nurses would receive a relatively small bonus.
Many of them went a year or more without a contract or raises — then went on strike with no pay. With the strike now in its 28th day, the financial hit could be major for the caregivers and their families.
“Providence truly does not care about their actual caregivers that actually do the real work that they like to take credit for,” wrote Teresa Harrington, a neonatal intensive care nurse at Providence St. Vincent, commenting on the Providence Facebook post. “There is nothing to celebrate here.”
Bard, for his part, told The Lund Report that nurses who worked through Covid feel they've earned the right to be appreciated. To drive to work past hospitals offering 10-15% higher pay makes him fear not just for him and his wife — who have three children — but for his team at work's ability to continue providing high quality care for their community.
“I think Covid strengthened us," he said. “We've got some really strong nurses.”
Vaden said she does see some improvements in the tentative deal for her hospital. But she said ratifying its pay scale wouldn't be good for patients due to high turnover and a constant stream of inexperienced recent nursing grads.
“We don’t need to be at the top of the market [in nursing pay], but we need to be able to attract and retain our staff,” said Vaden, while stressing she spoke only for herself. “It's disappointing.”
Based on what she is hearing from coworkers as well as how benefits and working conditions have eroded over time, “I would be surprised” if nurses approve the deals for Providence's Portland-area hospitals, she added. “But we'll find out tomorrow night.”
Two sides were far apart before deal
Before the tentative agreement was announced, Providence spokespeople had claimed to be offering raises of roughly 20%, but union representatives had called that misleading and said it still trailed wages at Oregon Health & Science University.
The union also had sought to align their contract timing across workplaces in Oregon, to give them more clout in future strikes. The new tentative agreement does not provide that.
Becker’s Hospital Review, a trade journal, reported that 2023 federal data, the most recent available, indicated Oregon nurses on average were the fourth-highest paid in the nation after wages were adjusted for cost of living. But nurses complain that pay increasingly comes with unreasonable demands.
The union has estimated Providence is paying replacement nurses $25 million a week during the strike, well over what their regular nurses were making.
Providence Oregon reported having lost $100 million in the 12 months ending September 30, compared to about $4 billion in operating revenue, amounting to losses of about 2.5% for the year. Overall, the multistate system registered about $150 million in operating losses on about $23 billion in revenues in the same time span; those losses were offset by about $400 million in other financial gains.
