Brigham and Women’s Nurses Postpone Indefinite Strike to Vote on Proposed Contract

The union representing roughly 4,000 nurses at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital postponed an open-ended strike scheduled to begin Wednesday to allow members to vote on the hospital’s final offer, the hospital announced Sunday.

The move follows two marathon negotiation sessions last week, where Mass General Brigham — the healthcare system encompassing BWH — presented its final offer to the union after nearly a year of bargaining.

BWH nurses represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike earlier this fall and gave the hospital the required 10-day notice for an indefinite strike on Oct. 2, demanding wage increases and lower health insurance costs.

Now, they will return to work as usual on Wednesday. A final date for the nurses’ contract vote had not yet been announced as of the Sunday update from MGB.

The new proposal retained annual “step increases” for nurses with less than 20 years of service, and added new raises for its most senior nurses over two years — an offer the union said did not meet its demands, even as it comes to a vote.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital is one of Harvard Medical School’s largest teaching affiliates, hosting roughly 180 HMS students for rotations annually. Upwards of 2,000 HMS affiliates also hold joint appointments with BWH.

Roughly 4,000 BWH nurses went on a one-day strike this summer — the largest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history, the union claimed — making similar demands regarding pay and healthcare costs. At the time, the union alleged the hospital was offering a zero-percent wage increase, a claim MGB has rejected.

The MNA said it has filed four unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the hospital made unilateral job changes without bargaining over them first, prevented some nurses from striking in July, retaliated against nurses for striking by changing their schedules, and threatened disciplinary action against nurses who didn’t remove their union buttons.

In a Friday update, MGB called the allegations “meritless” and said they were not “proven or upheld through the legal process.”

The hospital wrote in a message to nurses after a 13-hour bargaining session on Saturday that the parties had reached a resolution on several union priorities. Under the tentative terms, the hospital agreed to post 20 new 36-hour positions for a “float pool” after ratifying the contract — a step intended to reduce the hospital’s reliance on temporary travel nurses and current nurses who “float” between departments. The hospital also agreed to track “floating” between units through 2027.

The hospital wrote that it also agreed to pay regularly scheduled nurses $70 if they did not receive an hour and 45 minutes’ notice of canceled extra or overtime shifts.

MGB’s latest proposal also adds a 2.5 percent employee contribution for some nurses hired after the ratification of the new contract who opt into individual coverage in a post-tax plan.

But wage increases have remained a sticking point, even as the union elected to call off the strike. The hospital’s latest offer, for a two-year contract expiring in 2028, adds a 2.5 percent “top step” to all relevant pay scales on ratification and another 2.5 percent in September 2027.

In a Sunday statement announcing the postponement of an indefinite strike, the MNA wrote that the hospital “continues to refuse to provide cost of living wage increases, a strategy we believe is intended to break our union, putting patients and the community at risk.”

The hospital has maintained that it compensates its nurses at competitive rates. In a Friday update, it added that 11 staff nurses in the bargaining unit made more than $300,000 in 2025, with hundreds more making above $200,000.

“Nurses deserve to be compensated for their life-saving work. At the same time, annual increases in compensation must be considered in the context of the organization’s need to support its entire patient-centered mission,” MGB wrote in the update.