EMMC nurses reject contract Vote sets stage for possible strike

BANGOR – Nurses at Eastern Maine Medical Center on Friday overwhelmingly rejected what hospital officials have said was their final contract offer, setting the stage for a possible one-day nursing strike.

More than 80 percent of the voting nurses opted to reject the hospital’s latest offer, according to information posted just after 10:30 p.m. on the Web site of the Maine State Nurses Association. More than 75 percent of the 870 members of the nursing union voted in the poll, held Thursday and Friday in Bangor.

Several representatives with Unit 1 of the Maine State Nurses Association declined to comment late Friday or to release the exact vote tally. Instead, they referred to a statement posted online praising the vote.

“Unit 1 nurses are standing firm in their resolve to have a real voice for their practice and the safety of their patients,” read the statement.

Union officials will be required to give the hospital at least 10 days notice before organizing a one-day strike. In a statement, EMMC officials said they were disappointed with the vote and that the hospital is preparing to receive the union’s second strike notice.

If necessary, the hospital would bring in replacement nurses, officials said.

“The patients need care, and we will provide it,” said Lorraine Rodgerson, a vice president and chief nursing officer at EMMC.

EMMC nurses have been working without a contract since their three-year agreement expired at midnight last Sunday. The nurses voted last week to authorize the union to hold a one-day strike, but the 10-day strike notice was withdrawn Tuesday when the two sides entered emergency negotiations with the help of a federal negotiator.

While the union and EMMC administration have found common ground on several major points in recent weeks, including pay raises and health insurance costs, negotiations bogged down over the union’s insistence on the creation of a “professional practice committee.”

The committee, which was the union’s top contract priority, would have set nurse-to-patient staffing levels and would have influenced such things as technology used for patient care and the need for additional support staff.

The committee would have been comprised entirely of direct-care staff nurses but no nursing managers.

EMMC negotiators responded by offering to create a “housewide” committee involving both staff nurses and nurse managers, which would supplement existing staffing advisory committees on each floor. But the union insisted that having a committee made up exclusively of staff nurses was key to maintaining an open forum.

Underlying much of the negotiating dispute is the Maine State Nurses Association’s connection to the powerful California Nurses Association. The Maine union recently affiliated with the California organization, which supplied the model for the professional practice committee.

Hospital officials have called the California model “disrespectful and counter to the hospital’s culture of collaboration, teamwork, and transparency” because it excludes nurse managers.

“I’m afraid that EMMC, as the first hospital in the Northeast to negotiate with the California Nurses Association, is embroiled in a national political agenda,” Rodgerson said in Friday night’s statement. “Our job now is to work through it, caring for our patients with the same level of quality and safety that we always do.”

Union leadership allowed this week’s vote but urged nurses to reject the offer in order to “prove our readiness to strike for a voice in patient care at EMMC.”

“At our last federally mediated bargaining session we made a compromise proposal and offered to postpone our strike,” read an earlier message posted on the union’s Web site. “By doing so, we proved our good faith desire to reach a compromise without subjecting the community and our patients to a strike. In rejecting our overture, management revealed the opposite attitude.”

The Federal Labor Relations Board has scheduled another meeting with the two parties on Tuesday, Oct. 23.