Nurses at Fairview Lakes Medical Center in Wyoming, MN, are fighting for contract advancements to protect patients, recruit and retain exceptional nurses, and to stop management efforts to take back hard-fought compensation and benefits.

Negotiations officially began in June, with management proposing to deny health insurance coverage and other benefits to almost a dozen nurses who work half time,  increase mandatory low-need days by 50 percent, and continue inequitable pay differentials between clinic and hospital nurses.

“These proposals are offensive and unrealistic,” said Fairview Lakes MNA Co-Chair Sandie Anderson, RN. “Management is treating nurses as second-class citizens.”

Nurses are asking management to make a commitment to patients to ensure there will be adequate staff to care for them and to personally explain to patients if staffing falls below planned-for levels. Additionally, nurses are asking for improvements to wages and benefits. Sadly, management has failed to make efforts to advance patient safety or to provide nurses with a more secure economic future.

Nurses are calling on Fairview Lakes to:

• Protect patients;
• Address inequities between nurses who perform the same work;
• Retain nurses;
• Protect the future of nursing.

“Fairview should not try to increase profits on the backs of nurses,” Fairview Lakes Co-Chair Susan Kreitz, RN, said. “We are asking Fairview Lakes to put patients and the nurses who care for them first. That means addressing inequities including an unfair pay differential between clinic and hospital nurses.”

Nurses are speaking out about the unequal compensation of clinic and hospital nurses in a new video. The video highlights the high level of care clinic nurses provide to their patients and why clinic nursing is not of lower value than hospital nursing at Fairview Lakes.