MN nurses strike is over. Now what?

Interesting, I hadn't seen that. The StarTribune is the local Minneapolis paper (for those of you that don't know).

A lot of the message boards regarding the articles covering the strike in the Star Tribune have had really contentious postings.

Im part of a sister union, but not directly involved in this one. I can offer some thoughts from our past experience with one-day strikes:

Unlike an open-ended strike, the point of a one-day strike is not so much to force an immediate resolution, but to show strength and unity. In my experience, hospitals often underestimate the determination of the nurses/effectiveness of the union. Pulling off a good one-day strike with strong adherence from the nurses sends a message that you could do more if you had to.

My experience is that one of the biggest obstacles to settling a contract is when the two sides have very different beliefs about their relative strengths and weaknesses. For example if the hospital doesn't believe the union is willing to strike, or doesn't believe they have the support of the nurses, and the union feels confident they do have that support, then that dissonance becomes a barrier to a fair settlement. Once both sides have a matching understanding of relative strength, then you can get more productive bargaining.

So typically you go back to the table and try some more, hoping that what the two sides have learned from the strike helps to get them closer together. If the strike has been strong, the nurses come back to the table stronger. If the strike hasn't gone well - if a lot of people cross - then the nurses come back weaker. I hear this one was very strong, with rather few people crossing, so the nurses gained power by doing it.

What I'd expect to happen is that there would be another period of bargaining, and if that fails, another, possibly longer strike. This is a good, determined group, with pretty strong and unified support. On the other hand, management seems pretty dug in. Hospitals in California have pretty much learned their lesson, and I don't think we would see many of them want to come to the table with the kind of proposed cuts that the Twin Cities hospitals did.

This is all I have to say.

The biggest union hospital in our county has laid off many of it's workers.

Our non-union hospital system, albeit without all the benefits of the union hospital, is hiring.

I am very happy where I am.

So...guess you know, I'm not that big on unions...

I'm curious, I've been following this strike. I know that one of their concerns is staffing, curious what are the nurse to patient ratios on hospital units. I am a nurse in upstate NY, good staffing here is 1 to 4 patients. 1 to 5 is fair. I am a float nurse and work on a variety of floors. Every floor has telemetry, most patients are acutely ill. I've worked with an assignment of 1 to 7 and 1 to 8 very dangerous. I'm night shift, very little support staff, no secretary and limited tech support. What are the conditions in MN. Thanks

I can't speak to the MNA hospitals because I don't work at one of them. From what I have seen, the market is about like this here, although this could obviously vary from facility to facility. It's hard for me to say whether MNA hospitals are unsafe or not because I'm not on the inside, but I do know that over the last number of years things are getting tighter and tighter with the economy and budgeting and nurses do more and more.

1:4 to 1:6 (usually nights) on a ward. May have tele, no tele, or a combination

1:3 in a higher acuity stepdown (tele plus drips, more monitoring, some degree of instability, higher level of care)

1:2 in an ICU

10 years ago when I was a student at a local hospital though doing a rotation I was in an MNA hospital ICU and they were short, and a couple nurses had 3 patients. I considered that to be unsafe. I would say if I had to guess that kind of stuff is still happening.