St. Mary’s Hospital nurses allege widespread union busting | Health

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Allegations of union busting have emerged at SSM Health’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, where nurses say some employees have been threatened with unpaid suspension for wearing union-related badge holders within days of filing for a union election.

Nurses say they have been forced to remove union buttons while at work, told they cannot talk about the union while at work and had union fliers taken down from spaces including breakrooms, all violations of federal labor laws, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

Breanna Rhinesmith, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital of two years, said she felt threatened by management during a meeting in which she said hospital administrators claimed she was violating the hospital’s “solicitation policy” by wearing a badge holder, often called a badge reel, that read “St. Mary’s Nurses United.”

Rhinesmith said SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital President Eric Thornton told her nurses would be suspended if they did not agree to remove the badge reel.

“We were told ‘You will be suspended without pay and sent home today until you agree to comply,’” Rhinesmith said in an interview with the Cap Times.

Rhinesmith said she removed her badge reel so she could continue to care for her patients, “after I made them clarify that it was 100% under the threat of unpaid suspension and that I was not doing it by my own choice.”

Afterall, Rhinesmith said, what would happen if staffing levels of nurses are sent home and there are fewer people left to care for patients?

Dangerous understaffing is already a core reason the nurses are unionizing, she said.

Kelsey Mueller, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital of nine years, said she was ordered to remove an SEIU Wisconsin pin while at work. The Service Employees International Union represents health workers and public sector employees. When she questioned the order, Mueller said, she was referred to human resources, where a representative suggested wearing a union pin is as problematic as wearing a pin promoting the Klu Klux Klan.

“This particular HR person I was speaking with, she said to me ‘Well, you can’t come to work and wear a Ku Klux Klan pin. You can’t come to work wearing a political pin. So you can’t come to work wearing a union pin,’” Mueller said in an interview with the Cap Times. “I chose to take off my pin and stay for the day and work because I care about my patients, but the comparison of a hate group to our unionization was extremely, extremely hurtful, because we as nurses, we’re doing this for love. We love our patients. We’re doing this because we care.”

SSM Health did not respond to three separate requests for comment from the Cap Times on staff allegations of anti-union behavior.

The Cap Times asked SSM Health for a response to nurses’ allegations of removing union fliers from federally protected spaces like break rooms, alleged threats of unpaid suspension for union-related badge reels and the alleged comparison by HR representatives of SEIU pins to KKK pins.

SSM Health had previously sent the Cap Times a statement responding to the union drive itself.

“SSM Health respects the right of its employees to make a free and informed choice as to whether or not they wish to be represented by a union,” said the statement sent by the SSM Health media relations team. “However, we believe it is unnecessary and would get between the direct, open, and cooperative relationship we have established with our team.”

The health system defended its “fair and just market-based wages and benefits.”

For many nurses, the central cause behind the unionization is staffing levels, not pay and benefits.

“Obviously money is amazing, right? Like, who doesn’t love a higher paycheck? But for me, it’s mostly about patient-staff ratios,” Mueller said.

SSM Health said it preferred to work directly with employees rather than involve a “third party.”

“Having a direct employee relationship provides us with an opportunity to listen, problem solve and make improvements together in real time,” the health system said in an emailed statement. “It also affords us an immediate opportunity to recognize individual contributions and more responsively address individual concerns in a more personalized way.”

That relationship has been strained, nurses say, by the administration not listening to concerns expressed by employees over staffing levels and retention.

‘We have been pushed to a limit’

The nurses who launched the union care deeply about their patients, Rhinesmith said, “but we have been pushed to a limit.”

On some night shifts, Rhinesmith said, charge nurses — who are typically supposed to be around to direct care, assess staffing needs and provide assistance to the other nurses — are themselves required to take on a full patient load.

“It makes it very challenging, because when you only have two nurses on the floor, and say you have nine, 10, 11 patients on the unit, you can’t take a break because you don’t know if somebody’s condition is going to change like that and you need to have all hands on deck,” she said. “So there’s a lot of times we are working that 12-hour shift straight. We’re not stepping off the unit, other than to go to the bathroom or quick go grab another (beverage) from the fridge or something.”

Under these conditions, nurses burn out more quickly and it becomes hard to retain consistent staffing, Rhinesmith said.

Kayla Van Beek, who has been a nurse at St. Mary’s for three years, raised concerns about how staffing levels are decided.

Unlike the two other Madison hospitals who base nursing numbers at any given time on the acuity of the patients — or how sick the patients are — St. Mary’s bases staffing on the number of patients without taking into consideration their condition, Van Beek said.

“Most of us feel like we need a more consistent voice so that we can be a part of those decisions regarding staffing, retention and patient safety and care,” she said.

Nurses say patient load leads to burnout

Laura Katter, a nurse at UW Health, used to work at St. Mary’s Hospital in the emergency department from 2015 to 2022 and said she left partly because of staffing.

Katter was working at St. Mary’s when the hospital’s trauma certification level increased while staffing simultaneously decreased, she said. That meant the emergency department was taking in sicker patients who required more intensive care while the hospital had fewer staffing resources to offer.

Those challenges still exist at St. Mary’s, said Mat Arras, who has been a nurse at the hospital for four and a half years. He’s responsible for training some of the new graduate nurses entering the field. Many of his trainees are shocked when they leave orientation and are expected to take on five patients at a time, he said.

“We train the nurses for the first couple weeks with three patients and then four, and then after their orientation ends, let’s say they work on a night shift, it’s pretty common to get five patients. They were not trained for that,” Arras said in an interview with the Cap Times. “It’s contributing to burnout, where we’re seeing nurses leave the bedside with less than two years in the field.”

Arras said he supports the union because there’s power in numbers.

“If you have one employee that talks to management, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not going to be heard,” he said. “If you have a majority of the nurses talking with hospital leadership, there’s a better chance that there’s going to be a compromise.”

Part of a larger movement

A total of 870 nurses from SSM Health’s St. Mary’s Hospital filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board May 1 to hold a union election, according to the Service Employees International Union’s Wisconsin chapter.

The SEIU represents a variety of health workers’ unions across the Madison area including nurses at UnityPoint Health-Meriter who secured a new contract in May 2025, health workers at Group Health Cooperative who announced their intention to unionize that same month and nurses at UW Health who have been blocked from union certification by former Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10.

Katter, the nurse who left St. Mary’s Hospital in 2022, is now part of the union push at UW Health.

Staffing issues don’t just affect nurses at one hospital but strain resources community-wide, Katter said.

“Even though we’re nurses in different organizations, we all partner together to take care of the public,” Katter said. “We support each other. We have patients that get transferred routinely between our institutions, and we adapt to transitioning those patients. … What effects one hospital can easily have ripple effects to the other two hospitals.”

SSM Health operates seven hospitals across Wisconsin, including St. Mary’s Hospital on Madison’s south side. Nurses at SSM Health’s Saint Louis University Hospital in Missouri won a union contract in 2024 and are represented by the National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of National Nurses United.