Deer River hospital strike nearing 40th day as workers hold out for better pay, staffing

A strike at Essentia Health’s hospital in Deer River is approaching 40 days, as about 70 nursing assistants, lab technicians and other support workers hold out for better pay and staffing terms.

SEIU Healthcare, the union representing the striking employees, scheduled a rally outside Essentia’s headquarters in Duluth on Wednesday to highlight the prolonged walkout. The two sides remain at odds about Essentia’s “cross-facility” request to have Deer River workers voluntarily fill daily shifts at other facilities across northern Minnesota when the health system has staffing shortages.

Essentia pays workers considerably less at Deer River, a critical access hospital 15 miles northwest of Grand Rapids. That’s in comparison to larger Essentia facilities, said Sarah Roberts, a certified surgical technician and union negotiator. The union claims outsourcing Deer River workers is unfair unless Essentia boosts their pay to the levels workers receive in those larger facilities, she said.

“It sounds like its one of those situations where we don’t want to hire more people, so we’re just going to take advantage of those in the smaller communities where they get paid less, and we’ll just bring them in,” she said, adding “we’re all tired of being cheap labor.”

Essentia in a statement said the union is misconstruing its cross-facility request, which union nurses at Deer River and other hospitals are already working under without controversy. Essentia sometimes sends Deer River workers home early when the hospital isn’t busy, so this would give them the opportunity to choose to work at another hospital and not lose hours, the health system stated.

“The practice benefits our staff, patients and communities,” the health system stated. “It’s used only when necessary to avoid a disruption to patient care.”

Eight recent Essentia labor contracts approved this language, the health system noted, which also would allow the health system to maintain staffing at Deer River when it had need.

Deer River workers are asking for a pay raise in the first year that almost brings them up to the average comparable workers make in nearby hospitals, Roberts said. They then want 4% raises in each of the next two years.

The workers previously went on strike for seven days after their contract expired last September. They returned to work before launching a second, open-ended strike in early December. By the time negotiations resume Jan. 22, they will have been on strike for a combined 45 days in this negotiating cycle. That exceeds the 44 days Allina Health nurses were on strikes in 2016 during a prolonged dispute about health benefits.

Elsewhere in Minnesota, Twin Cities and Duluth nurses are beginning talks this year for their next three-year contracts, and their union, the Minnesota Nurses Association, has also raised concerns about cross-facility staffing.

Deer River is not among the 30 or so rural hospitals in Minnesota designated as financially distressed because they lost money on operations in four recent years. The Essentia hospital posted a 7% operating margin in 2022, the most recent year for which public hospital data is available.

The hospital has faced challenges, though, including a decline in inpatient admissions. Childbirths declined from 78 total in 2018 to 18 in 2020, and now the hospital no longer schedules them.

Roberts said the striking workers are resolved to hold out for their pay and staffing demands, having already picketed across from the hospital on snowy and cold days. Partial pay from SEIU is helping them financially.

“We’ve got coffee, we’ve got heaters,” she said, “we’ve got positive attitudes.”