Today, workers affiliated with National Nurses United are taking strike actions at three hospitals owned by Ascension Healthcare: Ascension via Christi St. Joseph Hospital (Wichita, Kan.), Ascension via Christi St. Francis Hospital (Wichita, Kan.), and Ascension Seton Medical Center (Austin, Texas). They're doing so in protest of stalled contract negotiations and a "systematic failure of the hospital system" and particularly Ascension to reinvest in communities it serves or the workers it employs.
The three hospitals and their approximately 2,000 workers are part of a broader trend of healthcare unionization. Seton Medical Center and Christi St. Francis unionized last year, while Christi St. Joseph did so earlier this year. All three hospitals also voted overwhelmingly voted to go on strike—each strike vote won with over 90% in favor.
You don't have to dig too deep here to see why those votes are so overwhelming. Ascension recently came under scrutiny for its practices, perhaps most infamously in a New York Times article which concluded that it “spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.” The same article notes the chain's longstanding practice of short-staffing, which predates even COVID-19. Underscoring how significant Ascension's issues are, earlier this year Senator Tammy Baldwin (Democrat, Wisconsin) wrote to the hospital chain questioning the chain's nonprofit status and noting that:
Ascension appears to be evaluating each staffing decision, service line, and hospital location as solely a business decision while seeking to bolster cash to put towards its investment funds. But Ascension is not a for-profit business. Ascension does not pay federal income taxes, and can profit tax-free from partnerships with for-profit companies, because the system has a commitment to serve the public. Cutting essential service lines, charging excessive fees, shuttering hospitals in high-need areas, reducing staff to unsafe levels, and suing patients that cannot pay their bills does not serve the community. It serves only your bottom line.