---
title: "Brigham Nurses Reject the Contract Everyone Knew They Were Going to Reject"
description: "Nearly 4,000 nurses voted down an offer with no across-the-board raises, reopening the question of an open-ended strike"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-23T15:09:03.955Z
modified: 2026-10-24T14:10:11Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/brigham-nurses-reject-the-contract-everyone-knew-they-were-g-68e727
language: en
tags: ["healthcare", "labor", "unions", "boston", "strikes", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Brigham Nurses Reject the Contract Everyone Knew They Were Going to Reject

*Nearly 4,000 nurses voted down an offer with no across-the-board raises, reopening the question of an open-ended strike*

By Nate Ledger · October 23, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/brigham-nurses-reject-the-contract-everyone-knew-they-were-g-68e727

## In brief

- Brigham and Women’s nurses voted to reject Mass General Brigham’s contract offer, the MNA local said
- The offer had no across-the-board raises; the union sought 3% and then 4% increases
- MGB says nurses start at $86,700 and reach at least $220,000, with 1,322 at the maximum
- The union must now decide whether to proceed with the postponed open-ended strike
- The vote came as MGB began layoffs last week, including some pediatricians at Mass Eye and Ear

Here is a negotiating exercise with a known outcome. Nearly 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have voted to reject the contract offer from Mass General Brigham, [the Boston Globe reported](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/23/business/brigham-union-contract-vote/), and the person chairing the union’s bargaining committee predicted exactly that before the counting started. “Based on pure anger at MGB and the board of directors, I would say 1,000 percent the nurses are not going to ratify this contract,” Kelly Morgan, a labor and delivery nurse who chairs the committee, said after the final bargaining session. The nurses, members of a Massachusetts Nurses Association local, did not in fact ratify the contract.

You might reasonably ask why you hold a vote whose result the leadership has already forecast at 1,000 percent. Morgan’s answer: because the members own it. “They have to have an active voice in saying what is right for them, and the city of Boston, and the patients that come and seek our care,” she said. There is some mechanism here too. A lopsided no vote is not just catharsis; it is evidence. It tells the hospital that the problem is the offer, not the bargaining committee, and it lets the union go back to the table saying, accurately, that the membership itself has spoken. The union’s statement after the vote said the committee is ready to return to negotiations “to resume the process for securing a fair contract that meets the needs of the nurses, their patients, and the community members they serve.”

The actual fight is about wages, and the shape of it is interesting. The union had asked for across-the-board raises: 3 percent for the first six months of the contract, then 4 percent for the following 12 months. The hospital’s offer contains no across-the-board increase at all. MGB’s position is that its nurses already receive something arguably better: a 5 percent step increase on each anniversary of their hiring, every year, until they reach two decades of service. Imagine a pay structure on rails, where your raise arrives on schedule without anyone having to ask for it. That is what the hospital thinks it is offering, and from its point of view a general raise on top of that is paying twice.

The numbers behind the hospital’s confidence: Brigham nurses currently start at $86,700 a year, and those with 20 years of service earn at least $220,000, according to MGB. Nearly a third of the local’s members — 1,322 nurses — are at that maximum, which MGB says makes them among the highest paid in the state. The hospital’s post-vote statement stood by the proposal, saying it included “meaningful compensation and benefit enhancements that kept Brigham nursing pay among the highest in the market,” and “reflected the hospital’s commitment to investing in our nurses while supporting long-term sustainability.” The nurses’ counterargument is that step increases reward tenure, not inflation, and that with the cost of living in Greater Boston they need raises that apply to everyone now. Both things can be true: the pay can be genuinely high, and the offer can still not be ratifiable.

## The cost of a strike

Hanging over all of this is the strike that hasn’t happened yet. An open-ended walkout was scheduled for Oct. 14, then postponed so the membership could vote. It would have been, as the Globe put it, enormously disruptive for patients and the hospital, but also expensive for the nurses themselves, who were prepared to forgo their pay and Brigham’s contribution to their health insurance premiums for the duration. And the July dry run showed how the arithmetic of strikebreaking works against short strikes: after a one-day walkout, the hospital locked the nurses out for four additional days, explaining that it was obligated to guarantee the temporary replacement nurses five days of work. Which makes a certain brutal sense. Replacement nurses are a bought-in-bulk product; you cannot hire them for one shift. So a one-day message strike becomes a five-day unpaid absence. MGB, for its part, said Friday it is “disappointed by the outcome” but “prepared to maintain uninterrupted care and respond to any steps the union may take.”

The vote also landed in a specific corporate mood. Layoffs across Mass General Brigham began on Tuesday of last week. Health system spokesperson Jessica Pastore declined to say how many jobs have been cut or how many are planned, but said department leaders have been told to cut their budgets. Among those affected are some pediatricians at Mass Eye and Ear, who MGB says have been offered positions elsewhere in the system. A hospital system trimming staff and budgets while its flagship’s nurses demand raises is not necessarily being dishonest about either; health systems contain multitudes of departments in different financial conditions. But “we are laying people off” is a difficult atmosphere in which to sell “meaningful compensation and benefit enhancements” that contain no new across-the-board money.

So now the union has to decide, as it puts it, whether to proceed with the indefinite strike, since the offer it delayed that strike to consider has been voted down. Morgan said the vote “shows the resolve of Brigham nurses, who are fighting for patient safety and for the professional respect we deserve.” Everybody’s stated position is that they’d like to be back at the table. The nurses are 1,000 percent not going to ratify the last offer. The next one is unwritten. The patients, meanwhile, are promised uninterrupted care, which is either the whole point of the exercise or the thing both sides are counting on while they fight about everything else.