“Pittsburgh is a union town,” people love to say. But when the rubber meets the road, unionizing can be a long and difficult process, as some local workers have found.
That difficulty didn’t slow down the nurses at West Penn Hospital, run by Allegheny Health Network. After Service Employees International Union nurses at Allegheny General Hospital, their sister hospital on the North Side, notched a major victory with a new three-year contract last fall, West Penn’s nurses began their push for a better working environment.
“We were on the back of AGH’s historical accomplishments that they made with their contract, and we really wanted to push further than that,” West Penn nurse Kari Xander tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “We’re trying to fix the vicious cycle of problems in healthcare.”
The SEIU emerged recently as a force in local nursing. Xander says discussions with the union had begun before COVID — but the pandemic forcing everyone onto Zoom made the actual organizing and bargaining process much more difficult. Still, the SEIU nurses managed to sign their first contract with the hospital. Their newest one marks significant upgrades over the first one, and may have helped set precedents for other nurses seeking redress in other health systems such as Western Psych and Allegheny Valley.
“One of our major accomplishments was that we were able to establish really significant pay raises for everyone,” Xander says of the new contract. “We were really facing a loss of just burnout, and we weren’t able to retain our experienced nurses, which has a really significant trickle-down effect. So what was really important to us is that we not only be able to recruit nurses by increasing our starting rate, but that we also were able to … keep our experienced nurses at the bedside.”
The union also secured an agreement for better staffing ratios and to give nurses with 20 years or more of experience additional incentives to stay on the job. Xander and the approximately 650 nurses covered by the new contract say they hope this is the start of more and better organizing throughout Pittsburgh’s important healthcare industry.
“We would love for Pittsburgh to become even more of a union town, especially in healthcare,” she says. “UPMC has thousands more nurses than we do, you know? And I can only imagine, if all of the nurses kind of joined in with our efforts, what we would be able to do.”
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2024 and Pittsburgh’s People of the Year (2024).
