Madison, Wis. – St. Mary’s Hospital nurses are celebrating getting their union election date of June 11 from the National Labor Relations Board, which is the next major step in their advocacy for their patients and their profession. This will be the largest private sector union election in recent Wisconsin history, since the turn of this century. Over 73% of the approximately 870 registered nurses at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital have signed union cards to have a strong voice for better patient care, staffing and retention. St. Mary’s nurses want to unite with union nurses at local hospitals Meriter and UW Health to raise patient care standards throughout the region. U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and Congressman Mark Pocan held solidarity events with St. Mary’s nurses last week to express their support.
“Helping people is always what I wanted to do, that’s why I became a nurse and why I’m building our union,” said Allison Willems, who’s worked in healthcare for 12 years and is a registered nurse in the St. Mary’s medical-surgical department. “Forming a union is an extension of our patient advocacy, so we can have real input into how we provide care. Because St. Mary’s doesn’t set staffing levels based on how sick our patients are, nurses can be put in a situation where you have to administer intense chemo treatments to a cancer patient, and then are being pulled to four other severely ill patients who urgently need pain meds or other care. That can be completely overwhelming, and I’ve witnessed new nurses break down crying in the middle of their shift. It hurts your heart when you can’t answer a call quickly enough, or can’t sit with a patient and offer emotional support, or you go home at night worried sick that you might have missed something. Nurses are the backbone of our hospital, and the time has come for us to be respected and heard.”
St. Mary’s nurses started organizing their union over a year ago and requested their election on May 1 in order to have a strong voice for addressing serious concerns around extreme understaffing, exhaustion and burnout, uncompetitive pay that penalizes experience instead of rewarding it, and punitive policies that drive nurses away from the bedside. Voting will begin at the hospital at 6 a.m. and end at 8 p.m., and ballots will be counted directly after. If the majority of voting nurses vote to join SEIU Wisconsin, SSM Health will be required by law to negotiate a union contract with them.
Staffing levels at St. Mary’s are around 40% below the Madison Metro average, ranking last out of seven area hospitals. Staffing at St. Mary’s is not based on patient acuity, meaning how sick a patient is, but rather on “productivity grids,” unlike at union hospitals Meriter and UW Health. Multiple clinical studies confirm that low nurse staffing levels lead to negative health outcomes, including longer patient stays, and increased odds of readmission and death.
By contrast, nurses at Meriter have been able to negotiate a strong union contract with safer staffing, a fair payscale that rewards years of experience, and supportive scheduling policies. St. Mary’s nurses want to unite with Meriter and UW Health nurses to raise patient care standards throughout the region.
In response to nurses forming their union, SSM executives have launched scare tactics including threatening to suspend nurses for wearing union buttons; pulling nurses away from bedside care to attend anti-union meetings with high level administrators, including St. Mary’s President; ripping up nurses’ union flyers; and distributing misleading propaganda. Anti-union campaigns are especially harmful in a healthcare setting, because they waste resources, distract from patient care and cause increased stress for the already-overburdened nursing workforce.
Nurses say that, as a “non-profit” Catholic charitable organization, which is funded in large part with taxpayer dollars, SSM has a moral responsibility to respect nurses’ freedom to form a union. Nurses also point out that SSM has massive resources to address their concerns. While nurses have been struggling, SSM had $12.6 billion in operating revenue, $1.1 billion in cash and cash equivalents, and $483 million in profits in 2025, and SSM’s CEO had $7.8 million in total compensation in 2024.
