Sparrow nurses’ planned strike could be part of hospital staffing trend
LANSING — A potential strike between nurses and the University of Michigan Health-Sparrow system fits a post-pandemic pattern of nurses asking for more, which may now be a recurring feature of health care, experts agreed.
Ramona Benkert, Wayne State University’s nursing dean, said the pandemic played a major role in reshaping how nurses view themselves in the health care sector, highlighting their value while more is being asked of them.
“I think it’s really more a sense of nurses are realizing what we are worth as a professional organization and maybe we’re worth more than we were led to believe before the pandemic,” Benkert said.
Traveling nurses could earn $80 or $100 an hour or more during the pandemic, she said. Hospitals had to pay to keep their staffing standards up to snuff, but Benkert said they may not be able to afford the rates that some nurses now expect.
Average pay in Michigan is $86,000 a year for registered nurses, who account for more than half of the state’s nurses, according to 2023 figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nurses have been negotiating, picketing and striking to highlight their changing needs.
Sparrow’s health care workers staged an informational picket in November to emphasize why they’re asking for competitive pay, more affordable health care coverage for themselves, increased staffing levels and better security measures. Their contract expired at the end of October.
The month before, a one-day strike in southeastern Michigan was averted as a different set of health care workers reached a tentative contract agreement with University of Michigan Health.
Nurses were often burned out during the pandemic, cutting into the available workers for a specialized job that can’t be done by artificial intelligence, said Frederick Morgeson, a professor of management at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business.
“The pandemic just really messed up health care, burning a lot of people out on the nursing side,” he said. “From an organizational standpoint, (nurses’) pay is going to have to increase because nurses can get it elsewhere. They work at Sparrow or go to McLaren or go to private practice, it’s a transferable skill set.”
He said a strike would likely be noticed by patients.
“From a patient standpoint, strikes are disruptive. While there’s labor strikes, my guess is there will be a shortage of staff and longer wait time something like when you go into a hospital on a weekend or a holiday,” Morgeson said.
The five-day strike that Sparrow’s health care workers are planning to start Jan. 20, pending further negotiations, could bring pressure on the hospital to meet the nurses’ demands simply because it’s difficult to find nurses willing to work in places such as emergency rooms, Benkert said.
Michigan has more nurses than ever before. Nearly 200,000 had licenses in 2024, according to state data compiled by Michigan Nurse Mapping Data. Benkert said the number of nurses isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s about matching nurses to the available jobs; many nurses are seeing options outside of hospitals as more attractive.
“I do think we’re going to continue to see more of this as nurses are really looking at their role and determining if they need to stay,” she said. “They’re moving to other sectors and the hospital has committed to a certain level and wants to maintain care. But they haven’t had in the past to compete with home health agencies and physicians’ offices and other areas of the primary care environment.”
UM Health-Sparrow officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. In an unsigned statement Tuesday evening, health care system officials said: “It is important to note that while a work stoppage is now a possibility, we remain confident that we can reach an agreement without one.
“We are currently taking steps to ensure that — in the unfortunate event that a work stoppage occurs — patients can still expect to receive the same safe, leading-edge and compassionate care close to home. We take our commitment to the community seriously and have a contingency plan in place for staffing. We will be fully operational if there is a work stoppage, with safety and quality of care remaining of the utmost importance.”
The nurses and health care workers are seeking better pay, better health insurance for themselves and their families and higher staffing levels including security, said Jen Ackley, an RN in the Lansing hospital’s emergency room and a union negotiator.
Ackley said she’s worked at Sparrow for 17 years and has seen health care become increasingly about profit instead of patients.
The strike is intended to pressure the management rather than patients, so the union gave management 13 days of notice instead of the required 10 days and the strike plans call for no interference for people wanting to go to or from the hospital, Ackley said.
“We are fighting for our members but most importantly for our patients and community. We want to be staffed appropriately,” she said. “It’s just become big business, just trying to squeeze out as much as you can from every health care professional. The normal now is to be understaffed as a baseline.”
There have been major health care strikes in recent years: In 2023, 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers went on strike in California and other states, and 15,000 Minnesota nurses went on strike in 2022.
The Oregon Nurses Association said in a release Wednesday that nearly 5,000 nurses, other healthcare workers and doctors in the Providence Health & Services system plan to begin a historic strike at 6 a.m.Friday. It would be Oregon’s largest strike of nurses and other healthcare workers and the state’s first strike by doctors, impacting 14 hospitals and clinics, the Oregon Nurses Association said.
There also have been major labor actions in other industries in the past two years, including significant auto worker strikes that involved local UAW employees and a Hollywood writers’ strike.
The National Labor Relations Board currently has at least 15 open Lansing area cases, including one filed by the U-M Health-Sparrow nurses union, which alleges unilateral contract changes and bad faith bargaining.
Other open complaints filed since July 1 include multiple claims against the Michigan Education Association and General Motors as well as complaints against the UAW 652 and UAW 602 and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers (AFL-CIO), along with companies such as Ryder, Dean Transportation, Neogen and Chipotle.
The Professional Employee Council of Sparrow Hospital-Michigan Nurses Association plans to strike beginning at 7 a.m. Jan. 20. Members plan to picket outside Sparrow Hospital on Michigan Avenue, the emergency department on Jolly Road in Okemos and a Sparrow health center, 2909 E. Grand River Ave., in Lansing.
Contact Mike Ellis at [email protected] or 517-267-0415
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