About 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital plan to begin an open-ended strike at 7 a.m. on Oct. 14, their union announced Friday, a walkout with no scheduled end at one of the nation’s top-ranked hospitals.
It would be the second strike this year at the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital, after a one-day stoppage on July 8 that was the largest such strike in Massachusetts history. This time the nurses set no end date, and they would go without paychecks for the duration. Under federal law, the union had to give the hospital at least 10 days’ notice.
“We have repeatedly tried to get MGB to negotiate and avoid a second strike, but the billionaires who run MGB have shut the door on us,” said Kelly Morgan, a charge nurse in labor and delivery at the Brigham who heads the local unit of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. “There is still time to reach an agreement that protects patient care and respects nurses.”
The hospital said in a statement that it was willing to meet if the union was “ready to make meaningful movement toward resolution” of the contract dispute. It maintained that its nurses are among the highest paid locally and nationally, with compensation in the top 10 percent of the acute care hospital market.
The hospital said its plans, informed by the July stoppage, would keep care steady. “While the hospital does not want a strike, we are fully prepared to manage through one, regardless of its duration,” Jessica Pastore, a spokeswoman for Mass General Brigham, the hospital’s parent company, said this week. The company has been in touch with US Nursing, the Colorado-based firm that supplied 1,300 temporary nurses in July, and said most had agreed to return if needed.
Wages sit at the center of the dispute. The union wants a 3 percent raise for the contract’s first six months and 4 percent for the next 12. Mass General Brigham is offering no new across-the-board increase, arguing that nurses already get a 5 percent “step” raise for each year of service up to two decades. “Continuing that pattern in every contract cycle is not financially sustainable,” the company told employees in a memo.
Brigham nurses start at $86,700 a year, and those with 20 years of service earn at least $220,000, according to the company. Nearly a third of the local, 1,322 nurses, earn that maximum. Over the past five fiscal years, Brigham said, nurses’ base wages have risen by an average of 55 percent.
The nurses point to inflation, the cost of living in Greater Boston and the company’s own books. Dr. Anne Klibanski, Mass General Brigham’s chief executive, received a roughly 9 percent raise in 2024, to nearly $9.2 million, and the system closed fiscal 2025 with a $2.3 billion surplus. “A hospital system with billions in profits can invest in permanent nurses, affordable insurance and wages that keep up with the cost of living,” said Jim McCarthy, a Brigham nurse and vice chair of the bargaining committee.
The two sides have held at least 25 bargaining sessions since last November, the company said, and it told the union at an Aug. 11 session that they were at an impasse. The union has filed complaints accusing the hospital of violating the National Labor Relations Act: interfering with neonatal intensive care nurses during the July 8 walkout, changing the schedules of nurses who struck and threatening discipline over union buttons, according to a union news release. Those filings let the union call the walkout an “unfair labor practice strike,” a designation that carries stronger federal protections.
Some patients were already weighing what a strike could mean. Andrea Edmonston, 55, of Norfolk, learned of the strike date on Friday on her way to visit her brother in a Brigham cardiac unit, where he had been for two weeks after major heart surgery, The Boston Globe reported. “This was a truly life-and-death issue that he had to think about and go through, and he’s been through hell,” she said. “I’m concerned because I want him to get the best care, and I know that travelers go all over the country, from hospital to hospital. Each hospital is different, and I’m concerned about that.”
A strike is not certain. In 2016, the union and Brigham settled the day before a planned walkout that would have been the first strike at a Boston hospital in more than 30 years. The last time the Massachusetts Nurses Association authorized an open-ended strike, at Tenet Healthcare’s Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester in February 2021, nurses stayed out 301 days, the longest strike in state history.
Brigham is not the only Boston hospital facing labor trouble. In September, nurses at Boston Medical Center voted to authorize a three-day strike over pay and staffing. They have not set a date.
Union leaders said they still hoped to avoid a long strike. “We’re not taking this lightly, but we’re at a point where the hospital wants to break our union,” the head of the union local said Tuesday. “They have the power to stop us. All they have to do is sit down at the table and have an open and meaningful dialogue, and we could get an agreement.”