St. Vincent Nurses Strike Sadly Reached 6-Months on Sept. 8th As Tenet Healthcare Continues to Deny Agreement to Ensure Safer Patient Care for a Community Hard Hit by Delta Variant To Date, Tenet has invested more than $100 million to prolong the strike and avoid needed improvements in staffing to ensure safer patient care, while engaging in a number of illegal labor practices to intimidate and retaliate against nurses for advocating for safer conditions With Marie Marie Ritacco, RN , St. Vincents Hospital, Worcester, MA
On Wednesday, Sept. 8, the St. Vincent nurses strike reached another sad milestone in their struggle against Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, which began a full six months earlier on March 8 in a last-ditch effort by the nurses to finally convince Tenet Healthcare, one of the most profitable corporations in America, to finally put their concern for patients ahead of their ravenous desire for profits.
As the strike, now the longest nurses strike in state history, reaches its seventh month, it is important for the public to remember how the nurses arrived at this point.
The fact that we are still outside this hospital, the hospital we love and have served, some of us for 10, 20 even 40 years is a travesty and serves as an indictment of Tenet Healthcare and their unyielding desire for profit and power at the expense of the suffering of our patients and our community, said Marlena Pellegrino, RN, a longtime nurse at the hospital and co-chair of the nurses local bargaining unit of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Our nurses want nothing more than to be back at the bedside to provide our patients with the dignity and expert care they expect and deserve from this, their community hospital. Unfortunately, Tenet has refused an agreement that would allow that to happen, choosing instead to spend millions to keep us out, to pursue illegal practices to punish us for our advocacy " all to avoid accountability for providing safe patient care.
produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Roseberg
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