LEWISTON — Registered nurses at Central Maine Medical Center voted Thursday to form a union just weeks after allegations that some of their colleagues were fired for engaging in union activities.
“We are beyond thrilled to win our union election,” Aaron McDaniel, an intensive care unit nurse said in a statement. “Prime Healthcare thought they could silence us.”
The Lewiston hospital is owned by Prime Healthcare, a California based company that runs 55 hospitals across the country. Neither a spokesman there nor one at CMMC immediately responded to a request for comment on the union vote Friday morning.
According to the Maine State Nurses Association, 91% of the nearly 300 nurses at CMMC voted to join the union.
In his statement, McDaniel said as members of the National Nurses Organizing Committee the nurses will “speak up loudly for patients” and be better positioned to bargain for a new contract.
The union says 15 nurses have been fired and five suspended for union activities in recent weeks.
At a rally Friday afternoon, Katie Grinnell, one of the nurses who was fired, criticized Prime Healthcare for “putting profits over patients.”
“You can suspend us, you can fire us, but you will not put out our flame,” she said with more than 100 supporters standing behind her across the street from the hospital.
Earlier this week, a spokesman for CMMC told the Lewiston Sun Journal that “employment actions are based on established hospital policies and standards and not any employee’s union activity or protected rights.”
The situation prompted Gov. Janet Mills to call on Prime Healthcare to reinstate the nurses fired or suspended.
Ruth Fitzgerald, a nurse in the ICU at CMMC, said nurses decided to unionize after seeing vacancies go unfilled, unsafe staffing levels, and even a lack of linens to keep patients clean.
Now that they’ve unionized, she said they will keep fighting.
“We have a voice,” she said. “We are not going to be quiet now.”