09/14/2026
📰Check out Labor Center Professor Tom Juravich in The Boston Globe on 9/11 discussing the 3-day strike authorization vote by 1199SEIU Massachusetts nurses working at Boston Medical Center.
"Tom Juravich, a professor of labor studies and sociology at UMass Amherst, said the three strike authorization votes since June by unionized nurses, including the vote at BMC, were unsurprising given national and local dynamics.
In the past decade, he said, the labor movement has experienced a national resurgence. Workers in health care, a dominant industry in Boston, have in particular flexed their muscles.
“Boston is a union town, and this is a highly organized industry,” he said.
And that industry is also in turmoil, with BMC particularly troubled. In May, it reported operating losses of $41.7 million for the first six months of its fiscal year, worse than the $30.4 million in losses for the same period the year before.
BMC attributed much of the losses to its acquisition of two hospitals ravaged by underinvestment that were formerly owned by Steward Health Care, the for-profit hospital system that declared bankruptcy in 2024.
The hospital will now have to contend with the public image of spending money on the Steward properties while saying there’s not much left for its nurses, Juravich said.
“We all love our nurses,” said Juravich. “Patients and families want excellent medical care, and they want nurses to be paid well enough and treated well enough so they can provide that.”
Full Article (paywall): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/11/business/boston-medical-center-nurses-vote-authorize-strike-over-pay-staffing/?p1=BGSearch_Overlay_Results
