Highway Hypodermics

Travel Nurses Making A Difference, One Hospital At A Time

Working Strikes

You set at the nurse’s station and the fax machine starts humming and printing.   You pick up the paper that it has spit out and read, “Nurses Wanted:  Make $5000 for just two weeks of work.”  Your first thought is “Wow!  Great Money!”   Then you realize that you have just received a fax from a company who is trying to find nurses that are brazen enough to cross the picket lines.

Every day in the United States, thousands of nurses are on strike for better working conditions, better benefits, better care for patients, better nurse to patient ratio’s and greater respect of those nurses that work the floor every week.

Strikes don’t just happen over night.  Time after time we see nurses and managers go to battle.  Only when all negotiation hope is lost is there a strike.  Nurses don’t necessarily like to strike, but sometimes it is what HAS to take place for a change to be brought on.

What does this mean to you as a travel nurse?  You are left with the decision of whether or not you will take the higher wages as a nurse “scab” and work the strike, or do you stay on the side of your colleagues and work other travel nursing jobs?

Why work a strike?  The biggest reason that I hear is “someone must take care of the patients.”  When the possibility of a strike is looming patients are diverted to other hospitals, patients with elective surgeries are rescheduled, patients with urgent surgeries are done in the limited capabilities of the limited hospital staff, doctors are given emergency privileges at neighboring hospitals for continuation of care, and eighty percent of hospital rooms are closed. 

The twenty percent of the patients that stay at the hospital are taken care of by travel nurses, and other strike nurses (Scabs) that are provided by speciality services, such as IMAC out of Cleveland, Ohio.  In a lot of situations, the nurse managers are also more directly involved in patient care.

The advantages to working a strike are high wages, free housing, meal allowances, short assignments, which invariably mean getting to do more travelling and getting to see more of the world out there!

The biggest disadvantage to a strike travel nurse is that your family is usually not allowed on these assignments because of security reasons.  The companies always provide security for the nurse, but to provide security for all the families of the striking nurses would require a much larger security force.  Nurses are usually housed in shared living arrangements, which is not very conducive to the family lifestyle either.

My colleague, Melissa James, has this to say about nursing strikes, “I believe sometimes nurses (who are unionized) MUST strike.  I also believe, as most nurses, that the patient must be cared for.  A reasonable solution:  TRAVEL NURSES!   Why?  Because the administration is paying A LOT MORE while we are at the bargaining table!   (No, because patients can be taken care of....), after which the "scabs" will go away and the Nurse can go back to work.”