Unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes go on strike again, calling out staffing shortages
Yesterday’s one-day job action at the southwest Baltimore hospital, like last year’s, took aim at understaffing that nurses say endangers patient safety
Above: Striking nurses and supporters outside Baltimore’s Ascension St. Agnes Hospital. (Ronan O’Comartun)
For the second year in a row, unionized nurses at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in southwest Baltimore went on a 24-hour strike in protest of management’s failure to address staffing shortages, which they say have resulted in patient safety risks.
A crowd of about 60 people, made up of registered unionized nurses and supporters, stood at the corner of Caton Avenue just outside Saint Agnes from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. yesterday, chanting and holding up signs that read “Patients over profits” and “Safe staffing would have been cheaper than this strike.”
“We’ve been stretched so thin on the units, they’ve been taking nurses off shifts … which then puts us to bare-bones staffing, and then we can’t give the patients the same care we want to give,” said Chachi Blackburn, a registered nurse at Saint Agnes.
The nurses, represented by National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU), voted to unionize in 2023 and went on strike for the first time last July 24. Yesteday’s one-day strike was intended again to get hospital management’s attention and advance negotiations.
“We’ve been bargaining with them for 2½ years now. They still stand on the same point that they think what they’re doing to us and the patient is adequate, and it’s far from adequate,” said Robin Buckner, a nurse at Saint Agnes for the past 10 years.
Working Short
One of the main consequences of short staffing is what nurses call “floating,” in which management reassigns nurses to hospital units they don’t normally work in when those areas are short staffed.
“There’s nothing in place for when nurses call out” sick, said Kimberly Rider, a registered nurse at Saint Agnes. “It’s almost like I feel the hospital blames us when we call out. No, you’re supposed to have an appropriate float pool staff to fill in holes, and they just let us work short.”
• Nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital plan one-day strike (7/23/25)
• Nurses return to work after 24-hour strike at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital (7/25/25)
Gideon Eziama, a registered nurse at Saint Agnes who’s worked in the cardiovascular department for the past seven years, recounted how he once was assigned to the delivery and labor department, despite never having been trained to care for newborns or someone in labor.
“If I work in the cardiac, you can’t send me to OB-GYN because I don’t know what is going on with somebody who is having a baby,” Eziama said.
Striking nurses Chachi Blackurn, Robin Buckner and Gideon Eziamoa outside Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. (Ronan O’Comartun)
Dueling Statements
Saint Agnes remained open during the strike. Unionized nurses gave Saint Agnes 10 days’ notice of the strike, allowing the hospital to find replacement nurses.
According to some of the striking nurses, the replacement or “travel nurses” were being compensated twice as much as the nurses working there full time.
“So they say ‘this budget, this budget, this budget,’ but they have the budget to pay for” travel nurses, Rider remarked.
In a press release on its website, NNU explained what unionized nurses are looking for in a contract with Saint Agnes management.
“The RNs urge management to invest in nursing staff and agree to a contract that provides safe staffing, retention of experienced RNs to provide safe patient care, and limitations to floating assignments based on patient safety,” the press release said.
According to NNU, the staff shortages stem from efforts to increase productivity by Saint Agnes Hospital, which they say reported $900 million in net profit in the last fiscal year.
The Brew reached out to Saint Agnes for comment and has yet to get a response.
The hospital said in a statement on its website that it has implemented wage increases over the last two years, resulting in nurses receiving an average 9% increase in 2025, with an additional 7% increase slated for this year.
Management had presented its best and final offer, the statement added, but NNU did not submit a formal counterproposal for nearly a year, and only recently indicated it had a counterproposal.
In May, the union’s bargaining team “explicitly stated that the primary barrier to reaching an agreement is that Saint Agnes will not agree to NNU’s requirement that all nurses pay union dues,” the management statement continued.
Union member Blackburn said the issue for the strikers is “not about money – it’s about safe patient care.”
“I hope they know we’re standing together,” she said. “We’re standing strong. We’re not going to back down.”