The union representing roughly 2,500 nurses and other health care workers at Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital on Tuesday voted to authorize a strike, though the union stopped short of filing the mandatory 10-day strike notice.
The United Nurses and Allied Professionals Local 5098 has been negotiating with the hospitals’ operator, Brown University Health, since their contract expired on March 31. After 26 bargaining sessions, a company spokeswoman said, hospital management presented the union on June 6 with their “last, best and final offer.’’
That offer, UNAP said, would shift roughly $1 million – more than $1,000 per member – onto nurses and health care workers in the form of higher health insurance costs.
“They’re increasing the deductibles and copayments that employees have to pay…by thousands of dollars every year,” UNAP president Lynn Blais said during a press conference Tuesday across the street from the hospitals. Management’s “last, best offer,” she said, also would allow for “mandatory overtime” for technical staff, case managers and other health care support staff – a requirement that can wreak havoc with workers’ personal lives. Blais said that the union successfully fought off mandatory overtime for nurses.
UNAP is hoping that Brown Health “does the right thing…and says let’s get back to the table” to negotiate, Blais said, and offers a deal that “treats nurses, health professionals, and patients with the respect and dignity they deserve.”
Federal law requires the union to give management a 10-day notice, in writing, prior to going on strike. Blais said the union has the notice “in hand,” and can send it at any time.
The two sides have been in talks to replace a seven-year contract that expired on March 31.
The hospitals’ management said in a statement that they have been negotiating in “good faith, and we hoped to avoid a strike.”
In 2018, UNAP held a three-day strike at the hospitals. If they strike again, Blais said, it would be an “open-ended” strike, like the one at Butler Hospital.
Unionized workers at Butler have been on strike since mid-May. Care New England, which operates the psychiatric hospital on Providence’s East Side, has cut off the striking workers’ health benefits and said it is looking to hire permanent replacements for their jobs. Butler also has said it has spent more than $3 million to hire travel nurses to keep the hospital operating.
The state Department of Labor and Training said Tuesday that the striking Butler workers are entitled to unemployment benefits, because they have been effectively “locked out” of their jobs. The benefits are retroactive to June 1, 2025.
