Striking nurses and leaders of Oregon Health & Science University broke off negotiations late Wednesday as the strike passed day 31.
No new talks are scheduled.
Union leaders said they would hold out until OHSU agrees to put more money on the table for a two-year contract. Nurses also are pushing the medical center to improve health coverage and drop its proposed limits on union communications in the workplace, said Kathleen Sheridan, negotiator for the Oregon Nurses Association.
Administrators at the state's busiest medical center say OHSU can't afford to pay what the nurses are asking, given the uncertain economy and the need for the nonprofit hospital to safeguard its reserves.
"We would love for our nurses to come back to work. On the other hand, we need to be able to afford the contract," said Bonnie Driggers, OHSU nursing director.
The two sides have edged closer after three drawn-out mediation sessions during the past four weeks. OHSU offered to raise by $20,000 per year the tuition reimbursement that is split among nurses. And the medical center proposed to develop a more affordable health insurance option.
But Sheridan, the union negotiator, said the university made the tuition money contingent on the nurses' accepting restrictions on union e-mail and other communications. She said the health proposal would take years to develop, leaving nurses struggling with steeply increasing costs. Meanwhile, both sides prepared for a strike that could linger.
The nurses association has expanded picketing to regularly include downtown bridges and all night at OHSU.
Nurses plan to rally today, the one-month anniversary of the strike, with a contingent of sympathetic nurses from Alaska and a leader of the United American Nurses, the national labor arm of the American Nurses Association.
An OHSU official said the medical center has enough replacement and permanent nurses to function close to prestrike capacity, which should improve its revenues.
Patient admissions filled the medical center to 81 percent of capacity Wednesday morning, near normal for January and higher than on the same day last year. According to the medical center, 310 of the 1,500 union nurses have returned to work.
OHSU's strike-related costs, however, still run to hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. And on Friday, a lack of specially trained pediatric nurses forced OHSU not to accept transfers of children needing critical care, leaving Legacy Emanuel Children's Hospital to handle those patients.
