Local news

Greenfield hospital nurses settle after eleven months

The three-year deal sets staffing floors on two floors and raises night differentials.

By Marisol Reyes · August 3, 2026

Nurses at Bishop Memorial Hospital voted 431 to 88 on Saturday to accept a three-year contract, ending eleven months of bargaining that came within nine days of a strike date.

The contract sets minimum staffing levels on the fourth-floor medical-surgical unit and in the emergency department. It raises the night differential from $4.90 an hour to $7.60, and it pays raises of 3.5 percent, 3 percent and 3 percent. The term runs through June 30, 2029.

Money was never really the fight. The hospital put a wage package on the table in March and a better one in May, and both times the bargaining committee sent it back over staffing. On medical-surgical, the new language caps a day nurse at five patients and a night nurse at six. In the emergency department it requires a fourth nurse overnight any time the census goes above fourteen.

"The raise is fine. The raise was always going to be fine," said Renata Volk, an emergency department nurse who chaired the bargaining committee. "What I wanted was to stop walking in at eleven at night and finding out I was the only one on until three."

Alan Pieczarka, the hospital's chief operating officer, put the annual cost of the staffing floors at about $2.4 million, most of it in travel nurses until Bishop Memorial fills the 38 positions it has posted. "We did not want ratios in writing, and I will say that plainly," he said Sunday. "We have them now. The job in front of us is hiring to them."

What the staffing floors actually require

The fourth floor runs 34 beds and is the hospital's busiest inpatient unit. Under the old contract there was no hard limit, only a staffing grid the hospital could depart from with a note in the shift log. The union pulled six months of assignment sheets and counted 61 nights this spring when the floor ran above the ratio it was asking for. Pieczarka questions how the union counted but not the direction of the number.

When the hospital misses a ratio now, every nurse on that shift gets time and a half for the whole shift, and the miss goes into a quarterly report to a joint labor-management committee. There is no cap on the penalty and no exemption for sick calls, which was the last item settled. The hospital wanted four unpenalized misses a quarter. It got zero, and in exchange the union dropped a demand that float pool nurses count toward the floor only after orientation.

Dee Sackett has worked medical-surgical for 26 years. She said the practical change is that she will know before her shift starts whether she is going to eat.

"Six patients on nights, I can do six," she said. "Nine is when I stop charting until the end and start making the kind of mistakes you think about in your car."

Eleven months and two mediators

Bargaining opened September 4 of last year and ran 27 sessions. Two federal mediators worked the case, the second one starting in June. Nurses held an informational picket on Conway Street in February in freezing rain, about 200 people, and voted 94 percent to authorize a strike on June 18. The union filed a ten-day strike notice on August 2 for a walkout that would have started August 12.

The hospital had already lined up a staffing agency and told the union it would pay $8,400 per replacement nurse per week. That figure got quoted back at the table for the rest of the summer.

What it costs and who pays

Bishop Memorial lost $6.1 million last fiscal year on $310 million in revenue, its third straight operating loss. Roughly 62 percent of its patients are on public insurance, which is high even for this part of the state, and its payer mix has gotten worse every year since 2021. Pieczarka said the contract does not require closing any service line this year. He would not say the same about next year, and when asked directly about the outpatient lab in Turners Falls he said the hospital reviews it annually, which is what he said in April.

The parent system in Worcester approved the deal Friday night before the vote. Volk said the union expects to spend the next two years watching hiring numbers rather than wage numbers, and that the contract gives it a place to do that.

Staffing language takes effect October 1, which gives the hospital six weeks to build schedules against it. The night differential is retroactive to July 1 and will show up in the September 11 checks. The joint committee's first quarterly report is due January 15 and is public under the contract, which is unusual and was the union's idea.

"Ask me in January," Volk said. "That is when we find out if any of this is real."