Participants hold candles at a vigil for striking nurses outside Meriter hospital in Madison Thursday evening. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Roughly 150 nurses and their allies gathered at dusk Thursday for a vigil to show support for the strike underway at Meriter hospital in Madison.

The crowd was smaller than the throngs that have gathered outside the hospital during daily picketing and rallies, but the feelings they conveyed were no less intense.

“We’re holding this vigil because beneath the charts, beneath the chants, beneath the signs and beneath the daily strength that it takes to strike is something deeply serious,” said emergency room nurse Shelby Davis. “We’re not just here for better contracts. We’re here for safety, for dignity, for the basic right to care for our patients without risking their lives or our own.”

With the vigil, organized with the involvement of two church pastors, the nurses and their union sought to cast the issues that led to the five-day walkout as a matter of moral principle.

“You are doing holy work,” said Pastor Justin Dittrich of Lake Edge Lutheran Church, opening the vigil at Brittingham Park on Madison’s near South Side, a block from the hospital grounds.

“The strike is not the end, but the beginning of a more just health care system for all people, workers and participants,”  Dittrich added. “We stand with the nurses of Meriter because they are healers, truth tellers, and agents of faith and justice.”

UnityPoint Health-Meriter and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin are in the midst of negotiations for a new labor agreement for about 1,000 nurses who work at the hospital. The nurses union began a five-day strike Tuesday after a bargaining session May 19 ended without a new agreement, and after the union’s bargaining team said management negotiators were not responding adequately to their concerns about staffing levels, hospital security and compensation.

Negotiations resumed Thursday, during which union bargaining team members reported some progress, and continued on Friday.

Among the union’s primary issues in negotiations has been a demand for specific ratios of nurses to patients.

“Even though I work in the ER and not on the floor, I see how staffing levels affect every part of the hospital,” said Davis. “I’ll never forget the one moment during my nurse residency, a new grad was recognized for taking care of seven patients on their own. Seven. That wasn’t a badge of honor, that was a red flag.”

The hospital management has said dictating ratios would interfere with its need for flexibility to respond to changing conditions.

Speakers said the demand is not just in the interest of nurses, but a matter of concern for patients as well.

“Ratios are for us — yeah, absolutely,” said nurse Dara Pierce. “But they’re also for everybody else and I think sometimes that goes unnoticed.”

The fear of violence in the workplace has driven nurses to demand a stronger role in formulating security policy, speakers said, along with measures such as metal detectors.

“We’ve had violent or unpredictable situations come through our doors with just one security guard assigned to ER and no metal detectors,” said Davis. “No one should have to feel unsafe when they’re coming to a hospital and no nurse should be expected to risk their life just to do their job.”

The lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began five years ago, continues to weigh on health care workers, nurse Annette Bernas told vigil participants.

“We were considered essential, but let’s be honest, we were expendable,” she said. “We didn’t complain. We showed up. We held hands when family members couldn’t.”

As the pandemic laid bare the importance of health care and health care workers, “we were hopeful that everything we gave would open the eyes of the world to the importance of nurses and support staff,” Bernas said. “But here we find ourselves in a deeper crisis. The burnout is real. Nurses are leaving in waves. PTSD from those years is something we still carry, and yet we’re being asked to do more with less.”

After the speeches the crowd walked behind a large yellow banner, carrying flickering candles from the park to the hospital entrance on Brooks Street.

There Pastor Raymond Monk of Milwaukee offered a benediction. 

“This new course has caused many of you all to make a decision to make sure that your voices are heard and the voices of those who are hurting, their voices are heard also,” said Monk. “I want to encourage you at this pivotal moment in history to continue to defy the norms and to make known to the world that things must change and that things must change right now.”

Faith upholds their cause, he suggested, adding that God “is always on the side of the oppressed.”