Brigham and Women's Hospital Nurses Launch Open-Ended Strike in Boston Over Stalled Pay Negotiations
Key keywords: Brigham and Women's Hospital nurse strike, Boston 2024 healthcare labor action, Massachusetts nurse pay dispute, BWH nursing work stoppage, fair nurse pay campaign, hospital nurse-to-patient ratio standard, Massachusetts Nurses Association
More than 3,800 registered nurses at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), one of the top-rated academic medical centers in the United States, walked off the job on Monday morning in an open-ended strike, marking the largest healthcare work stoppage in Massachusetts in over a decade. The strike comes after 11 months of failed negotiations between the nurses’ union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), and BWH management, with pay levels and staffing shortages emerging as the two core sticking points.
Nurses participating in the strike say their current pay rates have failed to keep pace with Boston’s soaring cost of living, which has risen by nearly 21% since 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The union is demanding a 24% pay increase over four years, alongside mandatory nurse-to-patient staffing ratios that cap the number of patients each nurse can care for at 4 for medical-surgical units, a standard already adopted by several other top hospitals in the Northeast. They note that under current staffing levels, many nurses are assigned 6 to 8 patients per shift, leading to higher rates of patient burnout, medical errors, and nurse turnover. BWH reported a 22% nurse turnover rate in 2023, well above the national average of 17% for large academic hospitals.
Hospital management has pushed back against the union’s demands, saying the proposed pay raise would add more than $120 million in annual labor costs that would force the hospital to cut other patient care services. BWH’s latest offer includes a 19% pay increase over four years, plus one-time bonus payments for frontline staff, but does not include legally binding staffing ratio guarantees. In preparation for the strike, the hospital has hired more than 1,200 traveling nurses at a cost of roughly $5 million per week, and has postponed over 400 non-urgent surgical procedures and outpatient appointments in the first three days of the work stoppage.
Massachusetts governor Maura Healey has publicly called on both sides to return to the bargaining table with a neutral mediator, noting that the strike is putting significant strain on Boston’s broader healthcare system, as emergency rooms across the city have seen a 15% increase in patient volume since the strike began. Union leaders say they are prepared to continue the strike for as long as necessary to reach a fair contract, while hospital officials say they will not return to negotiations until the union agrees to end the strike temporarily.
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As a Boston resident whose father was supposed to have a scheduled heart procedure at BWH this week that got pushed back, I’m frustrated but I fully support the nurses. My sister is a nurse at a community hospital outside the city, and I see how overworked and underpaid she is every single day. These people kept our hospitals running during the worst of the pandemic, they deserve to be paid enough to afford to live in the city they serve.
I’m a registered nurse who works at Mass General, we won our own pay raise and staffing ratio contract after a 3-day strike last year, and it has made a world of difference for both our staff and our patients. The BWH nurses have our full support, management’s claim that they can’t afford the pay raise is laughable when you look at how much their top executives are paid every year. The CEO of Mass General Brigham made over $25 million in 2022, they can definitely afford to pay their nurses fairly.
As a healthcare policy researcher at Northeastern University, this strike is a perfect example of the systemic dysfunction in the U.S. healthcare system. We spend more per capita on healthcare than any other developed country, but so much of that money goes to administrative costs and executive pay instead of the frontline workers who actually provide care. The state legislature needs to pass mandatory nurse-to-patient ratio laws to stop these labor disputes from happening in the first place, and to protect patient safety.
I had to go to the BWH ER on Tuesday for a bad allergic reaction, and I waited almost 6 hours to be seen by the temporary traveling nurses they brought in. It was a terrible experience, but I don’t blame the striking nurses at all. If the hospital paid them properly and had enough staff, this never would have happened. I hope they get the contract they’re asking for soon.