Corewell Health East nurses rally for better wages, working conditions as collective bargaining talks near
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Corewell Health East nurses rally for better wages, working conditions as collective bargaining talks near
Corewell Health East nurses rally at Southfield Center on Saturday. Rally comes three days before the Teamsters are scheduled to begin negotiations with Corewell. Teamsters Local 2024 represents nurses in Southeast Michigan and nearly 10,000 nurses. The nurses’ demands to Corewell include industry-leading wages and healthcare, safe working conditions, an acknowledgment of what organizers called a dangerous understaffing issue and an end to excessive overtime.”We need more security, not just the skeleton staff we have around Michigan,” Willow Bronson, a nurse at the Taylor Corewell campus, said. “We’re going to spend our lives working for this corporation,” the union’s secretary general says. “They need to understand that they need to take care of us after we have taken care of them. We want working conditions that we can live with,” Katherine Wallace, a speaker at the event said. The union is willing to use the $400 million strike fund if Corewell isn’t willing to negotiate, Fred Zuckerman says.
Carrying picket signs reading “Corewell: Where are our wage increases,” and shouting “When we fight, we win,” the rally comes three days before the Teamsters are scheduled to begin negotiations with Corewell Health East for the first collective bargaining agreement for nine campuses and nearly 10,000 nurses.
“I’ve been a nurse for 29 years, and this is the most unsafe work environment I’ve ever worked in,” said Willow Bronson, a nurse at the Taylor Corewell campus. “We need (Corewell) to protect us.”
The nurses’ demands to Corewell included industry-leading wages and healthcare, retirement security, safe working conditions, an acknowledgment of what organizers called a dangerous understaffing issue and an end to excessive overtime.
“We need more security, not just the skeleton staff we have around Michigan,” Bronson said.
Over a hundred nurses, some on their day off and some between their shifts, gathered with their small children, pets and spouses to demand safer working conditions and fair treatment.
Speakers at the rally included Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Genesee County Sheriff and Michigan governor candidate Christopher Swanson and several Corewell nurses.
The nurses are represented by Teamsters Local 2024, a newly chartered local of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters specifically representing nurses in Southeast Michigan and the first-ever union of Corewell Health nurses.
The rally comes after what nurses decried as the corporatization of the healthcare industry and dangerous work environments, with a number speakers and attendees sharing stories of being physically injured by patients.
“We have come together as nurses and community leaders and elected public officials to speak out and call out corporate greed,” said Katherine Wallace, a registered nurse and a speaker at the event. “Together, stand in strength and together, we will overcome.”
Teamsters Secretary General Fred Zuckerman, who organizers described as the “checkbook” of the union, said that the union is willing to use the $400 million strike fund if Corewell isn’t willing to negotiate.
Corewell’s given deadline for contract negotiation is December, Zuckerman said.
“We don’t want to have to go out of pocket, spend all our money on healthcare so we can make ourselves healthy to go to work. That should be their responsibility to provide health care,” Zuckerman said. “We’re going to spend our lives working for this corporation. They need to understand that they need to take care of us after we have taken care of them. We want working conditions that we can live with.”
In November 2024, Corewell nurses pushed back against what they consider a $1.7 million union-busting campaign by organizing three-to-one to join the Teamsters, the union said. In the months since, the union says corporate management at Corewell Health East has withheld to union employees several economic opportunities that were given to non-union employees, including refusing wage increases, withholding a regularly scheduled $250 bonus and denying 403(b) matches.
Corewell Health did not provide a comment when reached Friday afternoon.
Alison Lorentz, who works at the Taylor campus and left accounting to become a nurse 11 years ago, said the benefits “are the worst they’ve ever been” and healthcare is “seriously lacking” in Southeast Michigan.
Lorentz, who is a case manager, pointed to the salary of Corewell director Tina Freese Decker, who according to ProPublica Non-profit Explorer, made $5,358,468 in 2023.
“The trend in healthcare is getting more corporate … and as that happens care is becoming more profit-based than healthcare based,” Lorentz said. “The people at the top, they all make millions of dollars while we’re all down here trying to just be able to pay our bills.”
Lorentz said that a serious understaffing issue is impacting patient outcomes. She said in the Intensive Care Unit, the nurse to patient ratio is one to three.
“Every extra patient that a nurse takes on the risk of the patients in that group increases exponentially,” she said. “So that’s what we talk about. You know, our ICUs used to be one to one, one to two, now it’s one to three. That’s very unsafe.”
Lorentz added that Teamsters nurses’ bonuses and wage increases are being denied simply because they’re unionized, “but they’re giving all other non-union workers (the benefits). So this rally is to show that we’re united and to bring them to the table for fair labor administration.”
afayad@detroitnews.com