Minnesota Nurses and Doctors Walk Out Together — Because Hospice Care Is Not a Cost Center

Sixty hospice nurses in the Twin Cities walked off the job on September 11, and three days later 150 doctors at two Allina Health hospitals joined them. Both units are organized with SEIU. Both have been bargaining for over a year — the doctors for three — without a first contract. The company's public statement talks about "acting responsibly" to protect "the cost and availability of care." The workers doing the actual dying-patient care call it something else: being told, after a pandemic that canonized them as heroes, that holiday pay and predictable schedules are somehow not affordable.

This is not an isolated labor dispute. It is the sharpest current expression of a pattern researchers at Cornell's Labor Action Tracker flagged earlier this year: health care work stoppages in the US jumped 58% between 2024 and 2025, even as strikes overall declined. The industry that spent 2020 draping itself in "essential worker" rhetoric is now the industry generating the most strike days in the country — more than manufacturing, nearly double. The gap between the applause and the paycheck didn't close. It widened, and workers noticed.

What makes Allina notable is the alliance itself. Physicians and nurses striking in coordinated sequence, both under a first-contract fight, both SEIU, is a break from the old professional hierarchy where doctors negotiate quietly through associations and nurses unionize on the floor. When 91% of a group of doctors vote to authorize a strike, that is not a fringe grievance — it's an indictment of how thoroughly hospital administration has flattened everyone below the C-suite into the same disposable labor pool. Capital doesn't care about your medical degree when it's deciding what counts as an acceptable margin.

Allina frames the dispute around Medicare reimbursement rates — 90% of hospice revenue, they note, as if that settles the argument. It doesn't. Reimbursement structure is a policy choice, and hospital executives who accept six-figure compensation packages are not the ones absorbing the squeeze. The squeeze lands on RN case managers driving between patients' homes and doctors working without sick leave. "It seems their perspective is all about the dollars and cents," a hospice nurse bargaining rep put it. That's not a communication breakdown. That's the business model working exactly as designed.

None of this is unique to Minnesota. It's the accommodation-and-food-service pattern from the Starbucks years repeating itself in a sector with better union density and much higher stakes — because when hospice nurses strike, someone dying at home loses their case manager. The workers know this, which is why the walkouts are structured as short, escalating unfair-labor-practice actions rather than open-ended shutdowns. The pressure is aimed at Allina's board, not at patients. Solidarity means recognizing that distinction and not letting the company's PR flip it.

Sources

BringMeTheNews: Hospice nurses begin strike, doctors to follow

Becker's Hospital Review: Allina physicians, hospice nurses strike

CBS News Minnesota: 150 Allina doctors start four-day strike

Cornell Chronicle: Labor Action Tracker reports jump in health care strikes