Worcester Nurses Set Date To Vote On Offer To End Strike

WORCESTER, MA — St. Vincent Hospital nurses will vote on a new offer to end the nearly 300-day strike in early January following a tentative deal reached on Friday.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) union said the nurses will vote Jan. 3 to ratify both a new contract and a return-to-work agreement with hospital executives.

On Friday, union negotiators and executives from St. Vincent met in Dorchester with U.S. Secretary of Labor and former Boston mayor Marty Walsh. The talks, which were part of a series of late-December meetings, ended in a tentative deal to bring all the striking nurses back to their original jobs.

The MNA has not disclosed the terms of the new deal, but did say in a Tuesday statement that nurses "admit they did not get everything they sought." The nurses have said they achieved goals around increased staffing in the hospital — the main reason nurses went on strike in March.

“With this agreement we can go back into that building with great pride not just in what we got in writing in the agreement, but for what we have built together as nurses who know they did everything they could for their patients and their community,” nurse Dominique Muldoon said in the news release Tuesday.

The MNA will begin sharing details of the agreement with nurses via mail and in meetings this week. The Jan. 3 vote will close at 8:30 p.m.

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