Nurses at MyMichigan Medical Center Sault form picket line

SAULT STE. MARIE — A large picket line of nurses and community supporters formed on the sidewalk of MyMichigan Medical Center Sault on Tuesday, March 12 to protest lack of pay and benefits for MyMichigan nurses.

Hundreds of people, including nurses, doctors, police officers and other community members, participated in the two-hour protest.

MyMichigan Sault was known as War Memorial Hospital for most of its life, and in 2022 partnered with MyMichigan in an effort to help improve the hospital and its functions. During the transition from War Memorial to MyMichigan, many changes were made to employee benefits programs and pay structure, and nurses want things back to the way they were before.

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The nurses at MyMichigan have been working under an expired contract for the past two months, and are angry that negotiations are going so slowly. During negotiations, they are asking for an increase of benefits and pay.

Some of the benefits that the nurses are asking for are benefits they had under War Memorial but not MyMichigan, including lower deductibles and health insurance for spouses.

MyMichigan hospital officials disagree that the benefits package is worse, and argue that the increase of some benefits offsets issues such as paying premiums.

"They said that they liked the benefits when it was War Memorial, and they didn't like to have to pay premiums, but what people have to understand is that we got additional things, too," said MyMichigan Hospital President Kevin Kalchik. "For example, all of our staff get certain things like long term disability, so just because you have a premium does not mean you're getting less than the benefit because we absolutely think our benefit plan is very robust."

However, nurses are still struggling with their pay, and the problems are causing retention issues among the nursing staff. According to the nurses, wait times at the hospital are very high right now and will continue to increase as more nurses leave for better positions.

"We need to have wages and a contract that are on par with other Michigan hospitals because we need to recruit and retain nurses. It's been a problem for a while," said Brittany Barrett, a nurse of MyMichigan for seven years. "Regardless of what happens here today, availability of nurses is difficult and we don't have enough staff to properly staff up right now."

Registered Nurse Jill Halsey, who has been a nurse with MyMichigan for 28 years, said she is now struggling more than she used to with paying bills because of the lack of benefits.

When Halsey moved to the area from Pontiac 28 years ago, she took a $7 an hour pay cut because she knew she was moving to a smaller town with a lower cost of living. Since the cost of living has increased, nurses like Halsey are facing difficulty paying their bills, even thought they have been there for years.

"Other area hospitals are nearly $10 an hour more across the board than what we are being paid," said Halsey. "There is no lower cost of living anymore. It's the same as other places, so I don't understand why we continue to be so far behind. We're not a little tiny hospital anymore."

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When they tried to talk about staffing issues, some nurses report being told to find creative staffing solutions to make up for a lack of available nurses.

"We were told at one of our meetings recently that we need to start coming up with creative staffing solutions for the shortage. We asked our bosses what that meant, and they didn't really have an answer," said Barrett.

The stance of MyMichigan, however, is that even though staffing numbers are lower, they are not an issue that has affected patient care.

"I disagree when they talk about safe staffing ratios because we have excellent nurses and excellent staffing ratios," said Kalchik. "Patient ratio are better than most hospitals in the area, so to lead anybody to believe that we're not providing safe care and safe staffing ratios, it's just false."

Many of the nurses agree that these issues began when the hospital made the transition from War Memorial to MyMichigan.

"We were a small community hospital. The hospital cared about its employees. Now we're under this big corporate umbrella, and they really just don't want to put the care into our community that we do," said Barrett.

Hospital management believes that the MyMichigan partnership is still a great benefit to the hospital and community as it helped keep many existing programs and hospital functionality.

"We lost $5 million last year. In the past when we were War Memorial Hospital, I would have been thinking about what services do we close," said Kalchik. "But as a part of MyMichigan, even though we lost $5 million, we're part of a family and I have not heard once, 'Kevin, we need to cut services.'"

The picket line consisted only of off-duty nurses and doctors and was designed to not interrupt patient care.

"I support the nurses' ability to picket and voice their opinion. They notified us they would picket and they have a right to voice their opinion. It did not disrupt any care," said Kalchik.

— Contact Brendan Wiesner: BWiesner@Sooeveningn

This article originally appeared on The Sault News: Nurses at MyMichigan Medical Center Sault form picket line