Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston has fired or suspended roughly 20 registered nurses in the three weeks leading up to a union election — and the hospital and the nurses’ union do not agree on why.
The Maine State Nurses Association (MSNA), an affiliate of National Nurses United, says the hospital’s owner, Prime Healthcare Foundation, is punishing nurses for organizing. Central Maine Healthcare, CMMC’s parent system, says every termination and suspension traces back to a policy violation and has nothing to do with the union campaign. Both accounts are now on the public record, and a federal labor board is about to be asked to sort it out.
A vote set for Sept. 24, and a headcount that kept climbing
CMMC nurses filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board in August, seeking to join MSNA/NNU to negotiate a first contract on pay, staffing, and working conditions. As the campaign built — nurses picketed outside the hospital on Sept. 15 in solidarity with Prime Healthcare nurses organizing in Illinois — the firings started. By Sept. 18, Maine Public was reporting that 20 nurses had been suspended or fired since the campaign began. Three days later, MSNA put a fuller count on the record: 14 nurses fired and six suspended, for a total of 20. Central Maine Healthcare has not disputed that overall figure in local reporting; it disputes the reason behind it.
A Central Maine Healthcare spokesperson told reporters that no employee has been suspended or terminated “because of union activity or for exercising protected rights,” and said the actions trace to violations of longstanding hospital policies and standards, including ones tied to patient care and safety. The hospital has not published which policies were violated, by which nurses, or how many of the 20 cases involve the same underlying incident — citing, as employers routinely do, confidentiality around individual personnel matters.
MSNA disputes that account and calls the actions illegal retaliation. The union says it will file unfair labor practice charges against Prime Healthcare with the NLRB; as of this writing, those charges had not yet been filed.
Lewiston officials are asking who’s covering the floor
The scale of the firings has drawn in people well outside the union fight. City leaders in Lewiston have publicly pressed the hospital on what losing 20 nurses does to staffing at the region’s largest hospital, with local coverage framing the question bluntly: who is caring for patients right now. CMMC has not released a public staffing plan addressing the gap.
Part of a pattern at other Prime-owned hospitals
Prime Healthcare Foundation, a California-based nonprofit, closed its acquisition of Central Maine Healthcare on Feb. 16, 2026, pledging $150 million in investment over five years. Nurses organizing at other Prime-owned hospitals have run into similar friction: National Nurses United says Prime fired union organizers at Chicago’s Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital in June, and nurses at four other Prime facilities in California, Illinois, and Nevada filed a coordinated strike notice in August over staffing and stalled first-contract talks. Prime has denied a pattern of retaliation in each case; these are the union’s characterizations of those disputes, not findings by any court or labor board.
I’ve seen “policy violation” used as the honest reason for a termination plenty of times. But twenty people getting pulled off the schedule in the same three weeks a union election is scheduled is a pattern, not a coincidence, and patterns like that are exactly what the NLRB exists to sort out. If you’re organizing anywhere — Prime-owned or not — start documenting every write-up, every schedule change, and every conversation with a manager now, before you think you’ll need it. That paper trail is the only thing that turns “they said, we said” into an actual case.
The union election is scheduled for Sept. 24, 2026. Neither the vote’s outcome nor the disputed personnel actions had been resolved as of publication.