Registered nurses at Armstrong County Memorial Hospital in Kittanning, Pa., returned to work Oct. 7 after staging a three-day strike to protest stalled contract talks. The 230 nurses at Armstrong, represented by Healthcare-PSEA, Local 5120, set up picket lines on Oct. 4 after the nurses’ union rejected the hospital’s last contract offer. Both sides are working with a federal mediator.

”We truly would rather be at the bedside taking care of patients, but we did not feel the board of directors and management were listening to us,” the nurses said in an open letter to the community.

The nurses have been working without a contract since April, and after several months of negotiations, “we finally decided we had to draw the line,” says Terry Myers, an RN and the president of the Armstrong chapter.

The dispute centers on a number of economic and noneconomic issues. The hospital is proposing to freeze the nurses’ pension plan, which is funded by the hospital and offers guaranteed benefits, replacing it with a defined contribution plan, or 401(k), which would require the nurses to contribute their own money as well as determine how that money would be invested. The hospital declined the nurses’ request that it contribute

2.5 percent of their yearly wage to the plan and allow AFT Healthcare to educate local members on investment options and retirement.

Healthcare coverage is also at issue. Like most workers, the nurses are being asked to take on an increased share of their health insurance coverage. The request was not surprising, says Myers: “Healthcare has been the biggest issue in each of our contract talks over the last three years.”

What was surprising, says Myers, is that the hospital’s new healthcare plan proposal not only has a higher premium but offers fewer benefits than the nurses currently receive.

The union rejected a 13 percent wage increase offered by the hospital because, with the additional healthcare and pension costs, the nurses would see only 2 percent of the wage increase in their paychecks over the course of the three-year contract.

The nurses also are fighting for contract language to allow them to take every other weekend off and to end the practice of pulling nurses from their regular units to cover shortages.