Dozens of hospice nurses at Allina Health are on strike Monday, as they push for a contract and pay raises.
The group of 65 hospice nurses work in homes and nursing facilities around the Twin Cities metro area. They unionized in the spring of 2025 with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, and have been negotiating toward their first contract for nearly a year.
Nurses say it’s taking too long to reach a contract agreement. They’re also asking Allina to grant them pay raises during the bargaining process.
Susie Smerz — a hospice nurse and a member of the union’s bargaining team — helped lead a picket line outside the Abbott Northwestern Hospital in south Minneapolis. She says she loves her job, but the working conditions are stressful.
“We're not interested in working for free, we're not interested in being exhausted, we're not interested in being the sacrifice,” Smerz said. “It requires us to give so much of ourselves. We deserve to have management value us and try to work with us.”
Unlike nurses who work in Allina’s hospital, she said, hospice nurses don’t get overtime or holiday pay. Smerz says hospice nurses sometimes have to work 18-hour days, with assignments sending them all over the metro area to see patients. For those long days they receive the same salary they would get for working lighter hours.
“I want to do hospice until I need hospice,” Smerz said. “We're just having a harder and harder time being able to do that because we have a work environment that's not conducive to that.”
Smerz said those problems have led to turnover. She’s seen nurses leave Allina’s hospice program for other agencies.
A spokesperson for Allina Health says they're disappointed that the union chose to strike.
“We know the bargaining table is the best place to reach an agreement,” the organization said in a statement.
The spokesperson also said Allina has plans to continue patients’ care Monday during the strike.
Nurses plan to go back to work Tuesday after the one-day strike.
