Posted by James Eli Shiffer
After monitoring the nurse's strike from my desk all day for this blog, I traveled over to Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park to hear the voices of striking nurses firsthand. I found a knot of red-clad picketers around the main entrance to the hospital, and more of them marching along the sidewalk of Excelsior Boulevard and Louisiana Avenue all the way to the hospital's back entrance. By 3 p.m., some strikers had already been on their feet for nine hours. The wind was picking up and the sky thickened with an approaching storm. Passing motorists lay on their horns in support. The strikers told me they were resolved, puzzled by the inability to resolve the conflict, less than optimistic about whether this one-day action will make any difference.
As a young nurse in 1984, Lori Christian took to the picket lines to demonstrate for nurses' seniority rights. Twenty-six years later, she carried a sign with the same slogan, "New bricks don't make better care," but with the perspective of 30 years as a nurse. She now works with people undergoing chemotherapy. "Yesterday a lot of my patients asked me about it. They were surprisingly supportive," she said. "They've seen the nurses running around and not being able to keep up with the things they need to do."
Pat Grev has been a nurse for 37 years, 23 of them in surgery. She worries about the future of the profession. "I'm getting older. I want someone who can take care of me." Will the one-day demonstration make any difference? "I don't know. We haven't heard from the administration... I am so disappointed that they can't even come to the table and talk. We have been told over and over again that we have to work together as a team."
Jeanne Adomaitis was the most positive of the strikers I spoke with. A nurse for 35 years, 20 of them at Methodist, Adomaitis said she isn't the type to get involved in unions. But the troubles in the hospital made her join the union's bargaining team. It's not about her own situation. She says she's happy with the staffing and management of the recovery room, where she works. She also doesn't have any problem with her salary, $44.78 per hour. "I'm not complaining about it,'" she said. "I'm also not apologizing for it." The walkout has already accomplished something big, in her view: "It's pumped the nurses." That's just the beginning, she said. "We're going to have to do something after this. I don't know what."
