The Minnesota Nurses Association announced late Tuesday that Duluth nurses came to a tentative contract agreement with St. Luke’s hospital that would raise wages 4.5 percent. The three-year agreement would go into effect in July and run into June 2016. —Duluth News Tribune, 04/12/13 More »
March 1, 2013 - Lawmakers in Minnesota and the District of Columbia are considering nurse staffing bills, with a goal of improved patient safety and quality of care. The legislation is based on research studies that have shown how a nurse’s workload impacts adverse events, patient satisfaction and other quality indicators. —NurseZone.com, 03/05/13 More »
THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. — A group of northern Minnesota nurses will rally in Thief River Falls on Friday in support of a legislative proposal that would set minimum staffing levels at hospitals across the state. —Minnesota Public Radio, 01/10/13 More »
Earlier this spring, I stood on the steamy streets of Chicago and witnessed a revival that my union brothers and sisters in the Windy City said was a long time coming. I’d been swept into town a day earlier along with hundreds of nurses, union members and others to help National Nurses United (of which MNA is a founding member) launch what quickly became a national movement – the call for a “Robin Hood Tax” on the “Too Big to Fail” banks and Wall Street speculators who created this financial nightmare. —Opinion Editorial by: Walter Frederickson, R.N., 08/01/12 More »
One of the witnesses scheduled to testify during a U.S. Senate field hearing about collection tactics at Fairview Health Services offered a preview of her comments on Tuesday, May 29. Jean Ross said the collection issue surfaced when her grandson was being treated in 2010 at Fairview Ridges Hospital in Burnsville, after the 13-month-old boy had been rushed to the emergency room with what turned out to be an acute inflammation of the brain called encephalitis. —Twin Cities, 05/29/12 More »
Nurses in Minnesota are fighting against an irresponsible ‘Right to Work’ amendment that would make it more difficult for RNs to bargain for safe staffing levels, for construction workers to ensure safe worksites and for emergency responders, like police and firefighters, to negotiate for things that keep us all safe—like faster response times and life-saving emergency equipment. More »
Armed with new – and disturbing – evidence gathered from the front lines of hospitals across the state, Minnesota nurses introduced legislation today aimed at addressing patient safety through adequate staffing levels. —MNAnurses.org, 02/28/12 More »
Minnesota governors can't veto proposed constitutional amendments. But governors have bully pulpits. DFL Gov. Mark Dayton used his during last week's State of the State address to take a swipe at a bad idea that some GOP legislators want to add to the Constitution -- a ban on labor contracts that require all workers employed under the terms of the contract to pay a share of union costs. —StarTribune, 02/24/12 More »
A report published last week in Health Care Management Review downplays the importance of nurse-patient staffing ratios in the quality of patient care. But Linda Hamilton, two-term president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, maintains that those ratios are still the 20,000-member organization's utmost concern. —MedCityNews.com, 11/29/11 More »
The last 35 years have been disastrous for American unions. The percentage of the workforce represented by unions has declined from about 30% to barely 10%. As the unionized island in the center of the workforce has shrunk, every element of labor relations affected by unions - job security, promotions and lay-off, job descriptions, wages and benefits (pensions, vacations, health care, etc.), grievance procedures, attention to safety - has slid away from workers. There has been a similar deterioration in union influence in electoral politics and public debate about key issues. —Twin Cities Daily Planet, 06/21/10 More »
The last thirty-five years have been disastrous for American unions. The percentage of the workforce represented by unions has declined from about 30% to barely 10%. As the unionized island in the center of the workforce has shrunk, every element of labor relations affected by unions – job security, promotions and lay-off, job descriptions, wages and benefits (pensions, vacations, health care, etc.), grievance procedures, attention to safety – has slid away from workers. There has been a similar deterioration in union influence in electoral politics and public debate about key issues. —MR Zine, 06/13/10 More »
Drenched by morning storms, nurses across the Twin Cities were putting down their picket signs and getting ready to head back to work -- although they didn't know whether they'd be allowed to return. "We will go in en masse," said Glenda Cartney, who was with dozens of other nurses striking outside United Hospital in St. Paul at 6 a.m. Friday. —Star Tribune, 06/11/10 More »
Donning bright red, union T-shirts and waving “We care for you” signs, 12,000 Minnesota nurses walked off the job Thursday. Unable to reach a contract with six metro hospital chains, the Minnesota Nurses Association launched a 24-hour strike, the largest in the history of the United States. —Med City News, 06/10/10 More »
With two days to go before a planned strike, the Minnesota Nurses Association is going public with stories of alleged poor patient care to back its assertion that Twin Cities hospitals are dangerously understaffed. The union, which says hospital staffing is at the core of its dispute with management, has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon to tell some of those stories. —Star Tribune, 06/08/10 More »
Thousands of nurses in Minnesota and California on Friday announced plans to walk off the job for a single day next month if they don't reach contract agreements with hospitals. The nurses — 12,000 in the Minneapolis area and nearly 13,000 at hospitals across California — both set June 10 as a strike date. The walkout stands to be the largest in U.S. history. —Associated Press, 05/28/10 More »
Nurses turned out by the hundreds this morning to vote on a possible one-day strike at 14 Twin Cities hospitals, and many said the only suspense is about when the walkout will take place. —Minneapolis Star Tribune, 05/19/10 More »
Over the years, Jean Ross had become increasingly disenchanted with the national union that represents nurses. She felt the American Nurses Association (ANA) had drifted away from the daily concerns of bedside nurses. She suspected it had become more interested in promoting nurses into management positions. More »
