About 500 nurses at Ascension St. Joseph Hospital in Joliet are preparing for a four-day picket line starting Tuesday in response to a lockout announcement.
The nurses, represented by the Illinois Nurses Association, initially announced a two-day strike starting Tuesday in response to low pay and staffing shortages. Union representatives have been in contract negotiations with Ascension since May.
“The nurses had been set to have a two-day strike, aiming to create that urgency around negotiations, because their employer was refusing to engage deeply on issues around pay and staffing,” said John Fitzgerald, a staff specialist with the Illinois Nurses Association and the union’s lead negotiator.
But this week, Ascension canceled a bargaining session and issued a notice that union nurses at St. Joseph will not be allowed to come to work from 6:30 a.m. Tuesday until 7 a.m. Aug. 26 — double the planned length of the initial strike.
Ascension told Illinois Nurses Association representatives that they will not return to the bargaining table until Sept. 8.
Ascension did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. However, the company said in a news release that it is contractually obligated to replace nurses for at least four days during any planned strike. The hospital will bring in nurses from an outside staffing agency during the four-day lockout.
“Ascension Saint Joseph — Joliet would prefer not to have to utilize these extended contracted services, particularly given the current challenges the health care industry, including our ministry, is facing, but we must make every provision for ensuring the health and safety of our patients, families, providers and associates,” Ascension said in the news release.
Contract negotiations have been “an uphill battle” since they began in May, said Jeanine Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse on the bargaining team.
“At very first, they came to us with such a low increase in wages that it was insulting,” Johnson said. “In fact, it was the same proposal that was given to us back in November that the nurses had rejected.”
Johnson said Ascension initially said that when considering years of experience in wage increases, it wanted to omit years nurses had worked in other countries. Many nurses at St. Joseph come from the Philippines, Eastern Europe and Africa, Johnson said.
Negotiations are currently stalled on proposed wage increases in the new contract. Ascension suggested an 18% raise for nurses in their first six years of work, declining to a 12% increase for those who had worked for 17 to 21 years.
While the union nurses support high wages for new nurses, the descending raises over time incentivize older nurses to leave for area hospitals with higher base wages, Johnson said.
“It’s a slap in the face to not be recognized for our years of experience and years of service, because a large number of the nurses who have 30-plus years of nursing experience, it’s all been here at St. Joe’s,” Johnson said. “We do not see that anymore in nursing.”
Johnson said she worries that without a contract formalizing better wages, staffing shortages throughout the hospital — and particularly for union nurses — will worsen.
Of the 350 nurses who have left St. Joseph in the last five years, 120 worked in the ICU, Johnson said. They were replaced mostly with nurses from private agencies, forcing Johnson and other union nurses to become teachers on their own time.
“It’s very difficult to run a unit wholly on agency nurses because they’re not prepared well,” Johnson said. “They’re not given enough training to know what our protocols and procedures are … to add insult to injury, they’re paying these nurses the wages that they tell us are too high for our negotiations.”
The ICU floor, where Johnson has worked for 12 years, has recently scaled down from 48 to 24 beds to maintain a minimum ratio of 2 nurses to 1 patient — or 1 to 1 for critical cases. ICU nurses have been forced into a 3-to-1 ratio in the past, Johnson said, increasing the risk of serious complications for the hospital’s most vulnerable patients.
The hospital’s surgery and telemetry floors are currently operating on a ratio of 6 patients to 1 nurse, Johnson said.
“A nurse cannot, does not, have enough time during his or her day to adequately monitor these patients because he or she has too many,” Johnson said.
Fitzgerald says the Illinois Nurses Association plans to reach out to Illinois political leaders as negotiations continue. Organizers have been in touch with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, state Rep. Lawrence Walsh Jr., D-Joliet, and state Rep. Natalie Manley, D-Romeoville, among others.
“We’re going to continue to organize politically and hope that Ascension will come to their senses and negotiate in good faith,” Fitzgerald said.
Nurses allege that Ascension broke labor laws by hiring nonunion nurses from private agencies to do jobs covered under the union’s contract, without allowing these nurses to join the union.
The largest Catholic and nonprofit health system in the United States, Ascension added St. Joseph to its network of 142 hospitals five years ago. Since then, around 350 nurses have left the hospital, Fitzgerald said.
Contentious negotiations over staffing and pay also marked the last contract renewal for St. Joseph nurses in 2020. Those negotiations lasted more than five months, until about 700 nurses went on a 16-day strike that July.
One of the main strike demands in 2020 was enforceable staffing language, including a stronger plan for how Ascension would address future shortages at St. Joseph.
Before the 2020 strike, the last strike at St. Joseph was a 61-day strike in 1963. It was the second-largest nurses strike in U.S. history at the time and ended in the first-ever contract for St. Joseph’s nurses.
Next week’s picket and lockout at Ascension St. Joseph will begin just 12 days after the end of an 11-day strike at Loretto Hospital in Austin. Employees at Loretto won a new contract including wage increases based on years of service worked, as well as paid time off on Juneteenth.
Joliet is about 50 miles southwest of Chicago.
