What It's Like Being a Nurse in New Orleans

"Once we stamped a dollar sign on patients' heads, all bets were off."

Terry Mogilles speaks in front of University Medical Center in New Orleans.

In December of 2023, in the face of an extended anti-union campaign from their bosses, more than 600 nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans overwhelmingly voted to unionize with the National Nurses United. They became the first private sector hospital nurses to unionize in the state of Louisiana. Due to instransigence from management, they still don’t have a first contract 16 months later.

On May Day, the nurses will strike for the third time since they unionized. Yesterday they held a rally in front of their hospital to drive home their simple requests: safe staffing, and a fair contract. After the rally, in the shade of a tree on the side of Canal Street, I spoke to Terry Mogilles, who has been a nurse for 47 years, mostly in the needy city of New Orleans. This is the first time in her career she has had a union.

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Why did you become a nurse?

Terry Mogilles: I just think it was something that was in me. Empathy. I always had a consciousness, even in high school. Was always active with activism. To me, the ability to heal was a form of activism. Particularly in a community that needs it. New Orleans is a poor city.

How did you get involved with the union?

TM: When I came on (two years ago), the groundswell had just started. It seemed like an amazing culmination of my activism, my years in nursing—sort of like an exclamation point for my career. For me, and this is gonna sound a little cliche, it’s sort of a legacy project. I will not be nursing much longer. For me to make it better for those coming behind me is an awesome responsibility.

Tell me how the organizing was, leading up to the union vote.

TM: It really was grassroots, one one one conversations. We leafleted, talked to our coworkers. The union busting the hospital did was amazing. They were spending ten, twelve thousand dollars a day sometimes on having what they called “labor educators” come around to dissuade us. But the conditions and the need for change far outweighed everything they were doing. In December of [2023] we had the vote. Eighty two percent of the nursing staff voted for the union. And it’s been the ongoing contract battle ever since.

Did you feel intimidated at all during the organizing?

TM: No, I felt empowered. This is the first time in my career that I saw nurses from different backgrounds, different interests, different genders come together. I’ve never seen anything like that in nursing. You saw your button identifying that you were in a union, you waved. It was a camaraderie and a spirit that I’d never encountered before. That’s what kept me going.

Tell me about some of the things you want to fix at work.

TM: Totally safe staffing. I work in an orthopedic clinic, trauma clinic. So every gunshot wound, every motor vehicle accident, once you’re patched up, you’ve got to come through my clinic. Today we have 194 patients scheduled to be seen in that clinic. There’s no nurse right now—because I’m here. If I was there, there would be one. There’s medical assistants that they’re trying to tell me are trained to do the critical thinking skills that I do, the patient education, developing that relationship with those patients. These are gunshot wounds, these are accident victims, so they have to come through the clinic sometimes a year or two while they’re healing. They’re telling me that a medical assistant can do that. And why? Because they’re cheaper.

What would be a decent number of nurses in your clinic?

TM: Three! On the inpatient side it’s even worse. With the acuity, meaning those patients are really sick, it’s six patients to one nurse. If you’ve got something going on in one room, there’s no way you can see something [in another]. Patients are just fending for themselves. What I tell my patients now is, make sure you have someone with you if you go to the hospital.

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Is that something that’s gotten worse over the course of your career?

TM: Yes. Much worse. Once we stamped a dollar sign on patients’ heads, all bets were off. It became profit-driven. “We can find less qualified, less experienced people to do the job that nurses are doing and pay less. We can cut corners with supplies.” When I first started working in the orthopedic clinic, I had no wheelchairs. I used to go around the hospital and commandeer them from other places. In the orthopedic clinic! And that's common throughout the hospital. As I guess they look and prioritize, we are watching them acquire more and more hospitals and property. They now have 26 floors downtown on Poydras Street. They’ve acquired property across the street from the hospital. They have all these hospitals—get this one right before you go on to the next, is what we are saying.

And the reason you’re out here today is because they’re stalling on negotiations.

TM: Yes. We were supposed to be in negotiations today and tomorrow. They canceled, they said, because they got wind that we might go on strike, and they just canceled negotiations. Said they had to “get ready for patient care.”

You’ve been negotiating well over a year now, and the progress has not been good?

TM: Progress has been… we have wins, but they’re gaslighted as not our wins. One thing was workplace violence. They did put in metal detectors. This is an open access hospital. They did beef up some security measures, but they didn’t credit it to the union. When we started, one of the things—it seems minuscule—was parking. We had to pay for parking, like five or six hundred dollars a year. So they released parking, and nobody in the hospital now pays for parking except the union nurses! There was time off—they changed that policy in January, except for the union nurses. We know those wins are ours! They’re watered-down versions of what we wanted. We did get a big win with disciplinary action, where now there is a just cause process. So it’s a slow process. The [company] is good with optics, and pretending they’re the hospital of the community. So we know when the community comes out, it makes a big difference.

Is it fair to say that the community gets behind you more as they know what’s going on? It seems like people are naturally going to be sympathetic with nurses, more than with hospital executives.

TM: At some point in time in your life, you’re going to run across a nurse. Birth, death, in between. We know that. Nurses are trusted because we work really hard at being trusted.

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More

• Previously, in How Things Work interviews: Shawn Fain; Sara Nelson; Zohran Mamdani; Tom Scocca; Jeff Schuhrke; Eric Blanc; Stephanie Kelton. Also, a tenant organizer, a rideshare driver organizer, an anonymous DOL staffer, a striking journalist, an injured boxer, homeless people, and another unionized nurse.

• If you are wondering, “What is it with you always writing about unions and whatnot?”, allow me to recommend my book “The Hammer,” which is an attempt to explain why the labor movement and its decline is at the heart of [gestures to a nation spiraling into fascism]. It contains many great stories of brave workers, and you can order it wherever books are sold. You can also order a very exciting HOW THINGS WORK t-shirt, which looks fly as hell, and you can wear it to the upcoming May Day protests in New Orleans or in cities across the country.

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