Butler Hospital’s striking workers and management are scheduled to resume talks with a federal mediator on Wednesday, marking the first formal negotiations since the union last week rejected the hospital’s “revised last, best, and final’’ offer.
Roughly 700 unionized workers at the psychiatric hospital on Providence’s East Side have been on strike since mid-May. The union, SEIU 1199 New England, represents about 700 hospital employees and another 100 unfilled union jobs, said Amelia Abromaitis, a union spokeswoman.
The hospital is operated by Care New England, the state’s second-largest health system.
The strike has forced Butler Hospital to reduce its capacity by about 35% by closing about 70 of its 197 beds, increasing already stretched services for Rhode Island’s psychiatric patients. The hospital has also spent “millions” of dollars to hire temporary replacement staff from out of state, according to its president and chief operating officer, Mary E. Marran.
Leaders of SEIU1199 said that management’s July 11 offer failed to raise the wages of the union’s lowest-paid members, including maintenance workers and dietary staff.
A union official said there have been no bargaining sessions since the hospital’s July 11 offer. However, Butler Hospital leaders and members of its negotiating team “have had several meetings with SEIU officials since the start of July,’’ Mike Raia, a hospital spokesman, said in an email. He said the two sides agreed that what happened in the meetings would be “off the record.” The talks scheduled for Wednesday, he said, would be the first “with the large group since the July 11 offer.”
“We are hopeful that this next negotiation is going to get us where we want to be,’’ Dawn Williams, a registered nurse said Tuesday. “But these numbers are not where we need to be, and we’re not going back until every single member gets the living wage that they need.”
That includes union members like Robert Neves, 67, a father of three adult children who has worked at Butler Hospital for about 14 years. Neves said he earned about $17-an-hour as an “environmental services technician,” or EVS tech. He worked three days a week, from 6 AM until noon, pushing a giant bin on rollers throughout the hospital and collecting trash.
“We all do our end to keep the hospital together,’’ Neves said. “All we want, is to be treated fair.”
The lowest starting wages in the union contract are $18.03 an hour, the hospital’s Raia said, “which is 20 percent higher than Rhode Island’s minimum wage.’’
That starting wage would increase each year of the contract, he said, and remain higher than the state minimum wage as it rises. The total compensation – salary and benefits – for workers like Neves as well as dietary staff, Raia said, “would be nearly $75,000 under the contract Butler proposed on July 11.”
Since the union began its open-ended strike, Butler Hospital has cut off the striking workers’ company health benefits and has advertised to hire permanent replacements for the striking workers.
Federal law prohibits striking workers from being permanently replaced if the strike is to protest an unfair labor practice committed by their employer. But if the strike’s objective is higher wages or better working conditions, the law says, the workers are considered “economic strikers,” and can be replaced by their employer.
At the start of the strike, the union filed an unfair labor practices complaint against Butler Hospital, alleging refusal to bargain in good faith. The National Labor Relations Board would have to rule on that complaint to determine whether the strike met that definition under the law.
As of Tuesday, Butler Hospital had 375 job openings, according to its careers website. That’s up from about 100 openings at the start of the strike.
Butler Hospital is about 70% publicly funded, Marran, the hospital’s president, said, through reimbursements from federal Medicare and Medicaid insurance, which typically pay far lower rates than private insurers. And the hospital is anticipating steep Medicaid cuts under the Trump Administration’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, Marran said in an interview.
