FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2025
CONTACT: Megan Othersen Gorman / [email protected] / (215) 817-5781
ON THE EVE OF NATIONAL NURSES WEEK, BUTLER MEMORIAL NURSES VOTE OVERWHELMINGLY TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
99.3% OF NURSES VOTED YES!
“For the First Time in 40 Years, We’re Working With an Expired Contract”
“Nurses Will Go Sideways – to Other Healthcare Facilities – Before We Will Go Backward”
BUTLER, PA – The theme for National Nurses Week 2025, happening now, is “the power of nursing.” In complete harmony with that theme, 500 Butler Memorial Hospital nurses exercised their own power on Monday when they overwhelmingly – nearly unanimously – voted to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike if necessary.
A whopping 85% of Butler’s close to 500 nurses voted. Nearly 100% of those who voted, voted YES!
“For the first time in 40 years, Butler nurses are working with an expired contract,” says Butler ICU Nurse Tammy May, RN, longtime president of Pennsylvania Independent Nurses at Butler Memorial Hospital, the PASNAP Local there. “Bargaining with new owner Independence Health has proven to be very different and very difficult – especially when you consider that our primary goals during negotiations are simply to protect our nurses and our patients.”
Butler Memorial nurses are negotiating a new contract for the first time since Excela Health and Butler Health System merged on January 1, 2023, to form Independence Health System, which includes four hospitals in Western Pennsylvania in addition to Butler. Their contract expired on April 16th, and the nurses have been bargaining with Independence management since February, well ahead of their contract expiration date.
At the core of their concerns are quality of care issues like recruitment and retention of seasoned nurses, protections for caregivers, workplace violence prevention, and respect for the work they do – a “healing mission” for the Butler patient community.
“We have very reasonable offers on the table that would ensure we keep our highly skilled nurses at the bedside at Butler Memorial. That’s what we want. That’s what our patients want. That’s what a hospital that cares about patient outcomes should want,” says May. “But management is proposing to freeze our wages and retirement while significantly increasing the cost of our benefits. They want us to go backward. But nurses will go sideways – to other healthcare facilities – before we will go backward.”
As incidents of workplace violence increase at Butler, the nurses have also felt unprotected by management, holding a massive informational picket in late March with the theme “Respect and Protect.” When management refused to provide additional metal detectors at main entrances (there is currently a metal detector at the ER but the two other primary entrances to the hospital don’t have them), the nurses felt so strongly about the issue – and so unprotected by the current circumstances in the hospital – they offered to purchase a metal detector for the hospital themselves. Management recently agreed to that.
“The nurses at Butler are committed to excellence in patient care and to being valued within the Independence system and on Monday, we showed it with a powerful display of unity behind what we need for ourselves and for our patients,” says Emergency Department Nurse Cara Buckley, RN. “We, the caregivers of our community, are done being ignored. This vote was not just about our contract – it was about communication, safety, and respect. We are proud to stand together and demand what we deserve to care for ourselves and every one of the patients we serve.
A strike authorization vote by the membership authorizes their bargaining committee to submit a 10-day strike notice if the nurses’ issues remain inadequately addressed.
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Pennsylvania Independent Nurses at Butler Memorial Hospital is a Local of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), which represents more than 11,000 frontline nurses and allied professionals across Pennsylvania and was founded 25 years ago on the belief that patients do better when critical care staff have a voice to advocate for their patients and themselves.
