Butler Memorial nurses vote puts strike option on table
Butler Memorial Hospital nurses announced Wednesday, May 7, that a membership vote gives their bargaining unit the power to call a strike.
According to the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, over 99% of voting nurses at BMH were in favor of strike authorization, and 85% of the nearly 500 nurses voted.
The vote authorizes the nurses’ bargaining committee to submit a 10-day strike notice if the nurses’ issues remain “inadequately addressed.”
BMH nurses have been negotiating a new contract for the first time since Excela Health and Butler Health System merged in 2023 to form Independence Health System, which includes four hospitals in Western Pennsylvania. The Butler nurses’ current contract expired April 16.
“The theme for National Nurses Week 2025, happening now, is ‘the power of nursing.’ In complete harmony with that theme, 500 Butler Memorial Hospital nurses exercised their own power on Monday when they overwhelmingly — nearly unanimously — voted to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike if necessary,” an association news release said.
Butler nurses picketed outside BMH on March 24, saying the main reasons were worker safety and protecting benefits. In the lead up to the picketing sessions, association leadership released a statement saying hospital management was attempting to “gut our contract.”
At the time, there were three negotiating sessions completed and five planned in bargaining negotiations, and the Pennsylvania Independent Nurses at Butler Memorial Hospital, the association’s local chapter, decided the informational picketing sessions were essential.
“For the first time in 40 years, Butler nurses are working with an expired contract,” said Tammy May, who is an intensive care unit nurse and president of Pennsylvania Independent Nurses at Butler Memorial Hospital, in the news release. “Bargaining with new owner Independence Health has proven to be very different and very difficult — especially when you consider that our primary goals during negotiations are simply to protect our nurses and our patients.”
In the news release, the association said the core of its concerns also include quality of care issues like recruitment and retention of seasoned nurses, protections for caregivers, and workplace violence prevention.
“As incidents of workplace violence increase at Butler, the nurses have also felt unprotected by management, holding a massive informational picket in late March with the theme ‘Respect and Protect,’” the news release said.
The release claimed management refused to provide additional metal detectors at main entrances, noting there is a metal detector at the Emergency Room entrance, but the two other primary entrances to the hospital don’t have them.
“The nurses felt so strongly about the issue — and so unprotected by the current circumstances in the hospital — they offered to purchase a metal detector for the hospital themselves,” the release said. “Management recently agreed to that.”
May had previously told the Butler Eagle that workplace violence in hospital settings has been on the rise, and that nurses largely felt unprotected. She was not immediately available Wednesday.
The Butler Eagle did not immediately hear back from the health system.
The news comes following the health system’s April 9 announcement it was eliminating 151 positions.
