As the 2,000 courageous nurses at UMass Memorial Medical Center prepare for a one-day strike for safer staffing levels to protect their patients on May 23, the MNA has received dozens of calls from nurses across the state and from neighboring state’s who have been contacted by a Michigan-based scab nurse staffing agency that is looking to recruit nurses to undermine our colleagues and replace them during their strike.
We appreciate the calls and emails from nurses who have contacted us with concerns about this deplorable practice by UMass Memorial Medical Center management, and we urge all nurses to reject these efforts, and more importantly, to share this message with all of your email networks to ensure that no unsuspecting nurse crosses the righteous picket lines of our colleagues who are fighting for desperately needed patient care improvements. As nurses across the state are struggling every day to practice under increasingly dangerous staffing levels, the UMass nurses ‘fight is a fight for all of us and they deserve our support.
The UMass nurses have gone from working in the best staffed hospital in Worcester to the worst staffed hospital, with management insisting on six and seven patient assignments for nurses on evenings and nights at this level one trauma center, which has one of the worst patient safety records in the state due to the poor staffing levels now in place.
Instead of agreeing to provide safe patient assignments for nurses, the hospital today admitted that they intend to spend a minimum of $4.7 million to hire these scab nurses so that they can lock the UMass nurses out for at least five days following their one-day strike. That’s right, instead of heeding nurses concerns about the safety of their patients, the hospital wants to spend millions on nurses from all over the country, nurses who have never worked in this hospital, to replace these nurses and to allow management to continue to endanger patients on a daily basis.
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