UW Health nurses Matt Delaney and Mary Jorgensen represent only two out of thousands of nurses who have faced ongoing union efforts within UW Health.
UW Health nurses have endured various internal issues, such as wage caps, poor retention rates and short staffing since 2014. Though short-term solutions have been tested, many nurses still feel that if their unionization is not recognized, the future of UW Health will be grim.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What does a normal day look like for you?
Jorgensen: We start work at 6:40 [a.m.] and operations start at 7:30 [a.m.]. I'm in the operating room, so I will just do operations.
Delaney: I start at 7:00 p.m. I punch in and report on my two to three patients. Since I'm on night shift, I'm getting them ready for the night. I assess right away and then usually give meds and get them ready for bed. If they're intubated, it just requires much more intense care and checking on them every half hour. Our patients come back from the [operating room], so we then have a whole ‘nother list of things to do. So it kind of varies.
In your own words, how would you describe the UW Health Union struggles to someone unfamiliar with the issues at hand?
Jorgensen: It's been a really long time. We lost our union in 2014. In 2019, we tried to reorganize ourselves, and then COVID happened. So that kind of put everything on hold, and afterwards, in 2021 we started up again. We've talked to and educated a ton of people and got about 1,500 union cards signed. We have really just been trying to get recognition from the hospital which they haven't done, and now we're just working our way through legal aspects of it.
What are the benefits to nurses being unionized?
Delaney: I've only been a nurse for a little over a year. Just speaking as a person from the community, I want my family, who all go to get their care at UW, to be taken care of by the best and most highly trained nurses. You get that by treating them well, and the union is basically a structure in place that requires the hospital to respect those requests.
I've been at the hospital as a CNA going through nursing school before that, so I've seen a lot of really good nurses leave. I just think that having a union gives them the incentive needed to stay there. The only nurses with over 10 years of experience in my unit that I can think of are staying until their kids graduate high school. Those are the people that have taught and helped me the most, so I can't imagine having to take up that role of teaching nurses.
Jorgensen: Since we lost our contract, they just really stripped us of so many benefits that we had before. What we're really fighting with them now are the wage caps. I've been capped since 2014, and it's really bad for retention. A lot of the senior nurses are leaving, and it's tough.
It's tough on the patients because there's a lot of travelers coming through, and it's tough on new nurses because they don't have the senior nurses teaching them. That's what's happening in the operating room. People are coming off orientation and immediately turning around and training newer nurses. So that's really terrifying. We're working in level one trauma center transplants, and they're big cases, big, serious cases that need some knowledge.
What do you think the ideal long-term solution to the struggles at hand would be? How would this solution be accomplished?
Delaney: I think the ideal long-term solution would be having a union and then having a really good, strong contract. A contract I like, and I’m sure there are things to nitpick about it, is the Meriter nurses contract. Everything's laid out: pay scales, patient ratios, how much an [operating room] nurse can be on call. It's very good, very well put together, and it's been developed over many years, and it's very similar to the one that UW nurses lost in 2014. So having that back in place, I think, would be the best and only way to have what we need for our patients.
How do you envision the future of the UW Health system if the wage cap is not increased?
Jorgensen: You're gonna have really unhappy nurses, and unhappy nurses are not good for our patients. We want nurses to stay, we want to be treated well, and we want to be valued and respected. I mean, it's already been nine years of being capped, and we're tired. I just think the care has gone down since we've lost our union, and it'll continue to go down because we have a massive shortage. There's no reason for nurses to stay. They can go to Meriter or St. Mary's, make more, and continue to get raises.
Delaney: I think it'll be a lot like the systems that you see across the South where there's very little labor protection. Where it's a really low-paying job, the wages don't increase anywhere near with the rate of inflation. Nurses will typically go two years at a place and then jump to another place for a couple years or jump into traveling, and that's already happening here at UW. It's just not a sustainable system for providing the best care to serve patients, and you just can't bring in new nurses every year and keep paying them less and less.
Do these struggles within the UW health nurses union affect the public?
Jorgensen: It affects the public because they come in for care. With the nursing shortage, they then bring travelers who don't care as much about the community as we do. It's our community hospital, and we are vested in it.
Delaney: Like my parents, my friends or my friend's parents. If they worked hard their whole lives, have good insurance and want to get the top health care, they go to UW. If the nurse that's taking care of them doesn't care about that patient and is just focused on getting through their shift at that moment, I don't think that's right. I think the community deserves a lot more. The community gives a lot to UW Health, and it should get a lot more out of it.
Do you personally feel that the “meet and discuss” protocol advertised by UW Health to hear nurses's opinions is a truly effective way of expressing concern? If not, what do you think could be improved upon?
Jorgensen: It’s a great space to bring our concerns. What they do with those concerns is absolutely nothing. They have moved a little bit on certain issues, but we have seen nothing in writing, and they have refused to even entertain thoughts of ending the wage cap or overall compensation in those meetings. It's been an incredibly frustrating year. We went into it with full hope that this was going to make a difference, and it just hasn't.
Delaney: To have a binding agreement would be ideal. They have said, for a long time, they're going to do the right thing, and until there's a reason, they're not going to do it.
What are some of your personal or first-hand experiences with the effects of poor retention rates and short staffing within Wisconsin nursing?
Delaney: For me, I see nurses a year out of nursing school being in charge of a unit with 20 or 30 beds. So if something happens, stuff hits the fan so to speak. That person a year out of nursing school is in charge of that situation. If there's a cardiac arrest, respiratory emergency, anything, that's like a huge burden to put on a person that's only one year out with that little amount of experience, and it scares me as a nurse and as someone whose family or myself could find themselves in an UW Hospital. That's probably the biggest one that sticks out.
Jorgensen: It’s, again, new nurses teaching new nurses. We have just so little staff in the operating room that we had a level one trauma come up to our trauma room, and there was no staff to take care of that patient. And that is not what this community deserves. They expect to go there and get state-of-the-art treatment, and we can't even staff a trauma because we're staffing other traumas, and we don't have nurses. So it's pretty dire.
Is there anything that UW students and the public could do to support these efforts and stay more informed?
Jorgensen: Keep coming to our press conferences. We will get more yard signs; put them out. One of our union leaders is a teacher at UW, so we'd love for students to stay informed.
Delaney: Visibility is huge for us, so we will have informational tickets and things like that soon. Just try to attend our events.
