Union Caravan Calls Out Short Staffing & Low Wages at Essentia

United Steelworkers Local 9460 and Essentia Health have been locked in an intense battle for some time.  It began when Essentia responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by laying off health care workers.  Local 9460, pushed back at the time with informational pickets and billboards, exposing Essentia.  The union’s fight back campaign does seem to have resulted in fewer workers being laid off that Essentia had originally announced.   However, while many of the laid off workers were subsequently  called back, a number refused to come back.  And of the workers who have quit since, few have been replaced.  The result is the workloads across the board at Essentia have gone through the roof, and are showing no signs of improvement.  It’s not uncommon for a worker to be doing literally twice as much work as they were two years ago,  You can just imagine the kind of risks and problems a scenario like that can lead to in a healthcare setting, let alone the enormous strain that puts on the workers.

This year a number of Local 9460’s contracts with Essentia have come up for negotiation, including the two biggest ones, the Green Book and the Red Book, which between the two of them cover about 1500 workers.  Having made enormous sacrifices during the pandemic, gone through a mass layoff and then had to endure this massive increase in their workloads, workers at Essentia are expecting some kind of recognition and compensation.  But to date, Essentia has offered little.  Their initial wage increase offerings were less than 1% a year, and despite dozens of negotiation sessions since, they still have only come up to where they are offering somewhere between 1 and 2% for the different years covered by the contract.

This has resulted in the Steelworkers taking to the streets in a much more aggressive campaign than they have done in the past.  The union has done of number of internal actions, where workers have all worn union stickers on the same day, displayed union signs in their cars and similar type actions.  And now the actions have spilled beyond the workplace into the streets.

For example, during the Duluth Air Show, of which Essentia Health was one of the main sponsors, over 150 workers turned out for an informational picket on June 27.  This was the first time in the local union’s history that it has held an informational picket during contract negotaitions. 

Now, on July 12, the union followed this up with a large caravan of trucks and cars under the banner of “Essentia: Invest In Your Workers”.  The caravan weaved it ways throughout Hermantown, Duluth and Superior, visiting 8 different Essentia Health Clinics, Hospitals and other worksites, honking enthusiastically as they went.  In addition to Local 9460 members, the caravan was made up of other Steelworkers, such as a group for Local 1938 from the Iron Range, as well as other supporters from the community.

And just like previous actions, the car caravan elicited a great response from the public, illustrating how most working people have a pretty good idea of how greedy Essentia Health is.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 27 picket, Essentia announced that it was giving each one of its workers a $500 bonus.  This just days after the union accused the company of not having given its workers any tangible sign of appreciation for their efforts since the pandemic began.  There are negotiations planned for both the Red Book and the Green Book in July, so we’ll see if the caravan will move Essentia off of its ridiculously low wage offerings.  If they don’t, they union has plans for more and bigger actions.  Stay tuned for further announcements.