Maple Grove Hospital nurses vote to unionize with MNA

The Minnesota Nurses Association added roughly 600 members Thursday when nurses at Maple Grove Hospital voted to join the union, which has grown into a nationally influential labor organization.

The decision unionizes the inpatient nursing staff at one of Minnesota’s newest and fastest-growing hospitals, which opened in 2009 and quickly became the largest childbirth center in the state. The hospital is part of North Memorial Health, which already has union-represented nurses at its hospital in Robbinsdale.

”This decision is about having a seat at the table to make our voices heard and ensure our concerns are addressed,” said Emily Campbell, a Maple Grove nurse, in a written statement released Friday by the union.

Nurses have encountered burnout since the COVID-19 pandemic and rising rates of verbal and physical assaults at work. Both will be key topics, along with nurse-to-patient staffing levels, when 15,000 hospital nurses in the Twin Cities and Duluth areas begin negotiations this spring on new three-year contracts, said Chris Rubesch, the union’s president.

“Staffing will be something we focus on until we get it right,” he said.

Maple Grove nurses will join a group that includes hospital nurses in the Allina, Children’s and Fairview health systems in the Twin Cities, along with HealthPartners’ Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park.

In a statement Friday, North Memorial said it respected the decision of its nurses in Maple Grove and that it prioritizes “creating a supportive and productive work environment for our team members; this commitment remains unchanged with the results of the union election.”

Twin Cities hospital systems have negotiated their nurse contracts concurrently, in part to avoid one-upping each other with escalating wages and benefits, but the end result is a mega-event every three years in which the union seizes on the collective voices of so many nurses bargaining at once.

Nurses across all of the metro systems held a three-day protest strike in 2022 — considered the largest in U.S. history at the time — and a one-day strike in 2010. Nurses at Allina went on two strikes for a collective 44 days in 2016 over health benefits.

Hospitals have reported recent progress in addressing the post-COVID nursing shortage and its resulting problems, including empty, unstaffed beds in otherwise crowded hospitals and existing nurses burning out from long shifts.

The state’s annual jobs survey found a decline in the vacancy rate for registered nurse positions from 8.1% at the end of 2021 to 6.9% in 2023.

Staffing issues have already fueled more union activity, though, and not just in nursing. Allina’s inpatient doctors at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids and outpatient doctors across the state both unionized the past two years.

About 70 health care support workers at Essentia’s hospital in Deer River have been on strike for a month and a half this winter over salary demands and the health system’s “cross-facility” proposal to send the workers to other hospitals when they have open shifts.

Rubesch said cross-facility proposals could become a source of contention if they come up in metro negotiations this year.

The union has experienced turbulence, including a leadership shakeup last year that prompted its former executive director, Karlton Scott, to sue the MNA and accuse it of racial discrimination. The union also lost members this winter when nurses at Mayo Clinic Fairmont voted to decertify, following a similar move by Mayo nurses in Mankato in 2022.

Rubesch said he couldn’t comment on Scott’s lawsuit, but the union remains strong with a growing membership despite those Mayo votes.

The latest publicly available data say the MNA had 21,320 members in 2023, but the union has added members since that time, including Essentia clinic nurses in Duluth and Allina cancer and catheterization lab nurses. Nurses at the PrairieCare hospital in Brooklyn Park considered unionizing, but canceled an election last summer.

The union has taken credit for median nurse wages being among the highest in the country in Minnesota, and the highest when adjusted for state cost of living. The union also has lobbied successfully to keep Minnesota as one of 12 states that did not join a nationwide licensing compact, which otherwise allows nurses to practice across state lines.