Think Out Loud

Providence comes to deal with nurses and doctors to end 26-day strike

By Allison Frost (OPB)
Feb. 6, 2025 8:44 p.m. Updated: Feb. 6, 2025 9:13 p.m.

Broadcast: Thursday, Feb. 6

After intensive mediation, ONA announced a tentative agreement with 8 Providence hospitals. Nurses continued their strike while reviewing the deal and preparing for a ratification vote later in the week.

After intensive mediation, ONA announced a tentative agreement with 8 Providence hospitals. Nurses continued their strike while reviewing the deal and preparing for a ratification vote later in the week.

Amelia Templeton / OPB

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The largest health care strike in Oregon history appears to be at an end. The unions representing most of the 5,000 Providence doctors and nurses who worked at eight different hospitals and six clinics around the state have now reached contract agreement. Union leaders say if members vote to approve the deal Thursday and Friday, they will end the strike and return to work immediately. We get the latest from OPB health reporter Amelia Templeton.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Late Tuesday evening, the Oregon Nurses Association announced it had reached a tentative deal with Providence to end one of the largest healthcare strikes in state history. It came after 26 days of picket lines at various Providence facilities in many of Oregon’s biggest cities, but rank-and-file union members, nurses and doctors, still have to approve this deal. Amelia Templeton has been following the situation for weeks, and she joins us now. It’s good to have you back.

Amelia Templeton: Thanks, Dave.

Miller: Can you just first remind us of the scale of this strike?

Templeton: Yeah, it’s big – statewide, eight hospitals and a number of clinic locations as well, almost 5,000 nurses. As far as anybody knows, that’s the largest nurses strike in state history. And also what made it unique was that there are now some small groups of unionized doctors and advanced practitioners at Providence. So more than 100 doctors, midwives, nurse practitioners were also on the picket lines.

Miller: What were the big sticking points here, the contract provisions that led to this strike in the first place?

Templeton: I consistently heard a couple of things from the nurses and the doctors that I spoke to. One was this sense that they have been pushed to be more and more and more productive, that staffing has been too … There’s just not robust enough staffing across the system and as a result, people’s workloads have become increasingly unmanageable. Kind of buried in that, there is often a request for wage increases. People believe part of the problem is that Providence hasn’t been competitive enough against OHSU, Legacy, other places locally. But really, especially in the case of the doctors who were striking, they were looking for some pretty unique things in terms of reducing their working hours or more protections around, if they’ve worked a really long shift, not having to come right back in again.

Miller: What can you tell us about the deal on the table right now?

Templeton: Well, there’s a number of different deals on the table right now. The big deal is essentially the tentative agreement between the nurses – the biggest part of the labor force that was on strike – and Providence. And I’ve only seen high-level summaries of those agreements. Neither Providence nor the union is speaking publicly about it right now. We’re in this kind of sensitive period before the vote, where they don’t want to seem like they’re trying to influence the members through public statements.

But what we know from the union summaries that have been shared is that there are pretty significant pay raises in this contract. There is some of the language the union had pushed for around nurse staffing. Essentially, Oregon has a nurse staffing law on the books. That law was a compromise between the union and hospitals. Not everybody was happy with how it’s played out in effect, and the union wanted more of that language in contracts so that they can use bargaining as a way to push for staffing increases. They didn’t get, I think, all of what they were looking for there, but they got part of the way.

Some other things – there’s a ratification bonus, essentially a bonus for signing the deal. And there are some other little bumpers around staffing, like nurses will get an hour of pay if they miss a lunch or a meal break, sort of incentive to make sure people are getting those breaks.

Miller: All right, so you mentioned that that’s really about nurses, by far the biggest chunk of people who are striking, but not everybody. There are other healthcare professionals, other MDs, nurse practitioners. Has everyone come to a tentative agreement?

Templeton: Yes. The last group that still didn’t have one was hospitalists at Providence St. Vincent’s.

Miller: Those are doctors based at hospitals?

Templeton: They provide care for everyone in the hospital who’s not in the midst of some acute surgery, emergency or something like that. Again, this is a group that’s pushing for some unique things. What they’ve shared publicly, they’ve said they’ve gotten some of what they were looking for. They wanted protection against their jobs being subcontracted out. They said they essentially got that language. They were also looking for pay increases and reductions in their workload.

Miller: This is called a tentative agreement because members of the union still have to vote on it. What’s the timeline for that vote?

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Templeton: So essentially, they vote by hospital or by bargaining unit. Most of the [votes] will be done by Friday afternoon. The vote at Providence Medford, those nurses have a little bit longer. That concludes on Saturday.

Miller: What have you been hearing from nurses over the last 24 hours?

Templeton: I went out to Providence St. Vincent, which has had one of the more active picket lines throughout the strike. And there is this agreement in place, but people are still on strike, technically they’re not back at their jobs. They still have to decide if they want to sign off on this or not. And at St. Vincent, there were more than 100 nurses, doctors, still out picketing. And I sort of canvassed the crowd and down to a person, they didn’t like the deal. This was a group of people that was quite unhappy with, essentially what they said was, for how long we have been out and for the scale of this strike, the gains that we were able to achieve. Two nurses that I spoke to, they were neonatal ICU nurses, Kristine Loudd and Kami Hanchett, kind of explained what their issues were and these were really shared by a lot of people.

Kami Hanchett [recording]: I’m going to vote no. And that is simply because they will not move with their language on staffing, for safe staffing. They want to interpret the law to give as many patients as possible to each nurse, so they don’t have to have more nurses. That doesn’t feel safe for the community. It doesn’t feel safe for your nursing license and it feels like a terrible idea.

Kristine Loudd [recording]: And then the other thing that’s important is what we’re calling retropay, which is, because our contract’s been expired for over a year now, it would be the money that we were owed. They have absolutely refused that, to give us our money that we’ve earned in this past year that I’ve been working. They’re not going to give us that money.

Miller: In an ideal world, union negotiators have their fingers on the pulse of members enough that they can be pretty sure that rank-and-file will actually go along with the tentative agreement. Do you have a sense right now for whether or not that’s the case?

Templeton: Yes, sort of. First of all, the nurses that I spoke to, this is a somewhat self-selecting group of people. There are people who are out the day after this deal has been announced still picketing, right? So I think it’s harder to know what the broader membership feels, for one. And two, I think you have to keep in mind we’re talking about eight different hospitals where working conditions might be different. You have hospitals here in Portland, Providence St. Vincent in particular, they’re seeing some of the sickest patients of anywhere in the entire state. That’s a group of people for whom an issue like, does the hospital agree to reduce the number of patients and nurses assigned if they’re caring for somebody who’s really sick? That might be critically important for the nurses there, [but] less important at a more rural hospital that’s caring for few of those extremely sick patients.

Miller: And they’re all voting separately.

Templeton: That’s right. So this is a situation where this deal could potentially sail through in some hospitals but not others.

The other thing I would say, though, is unions are a democracy. So I do think that the people who negotiated this deal and are presenting it to their members, they wouldn’t have done this unless they thought this was really the best compromise they could get. But they also know it’s up to their members to decide if they think it’s good enough, and if not, they’ll be back at the bargaining table.

Miller: What impact has this strike had on patients?

Templeton: It’s one of the hardest questions to answer because during a strike, everybody is kind of trying to play up that issue.

Miller: And to blame the other side.

Templeton: Yeah, exactly. It has absolutely had an impact on patients, though, I think both just from things that I have heard indirectly or directly from people working in the hospitals. And Providence up and said they had to transfer a number of their patients who were later in pregnancy to outside providers because they simply couldn’t provide care during the strike.

Miller: Amelia, thanks very much.

Templeton: You’re welcome.

Miller: Amelia Templeton reports on health and healthcare for OPB.

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