Nurses at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston voted 204 to 21 — roughly 91% — on Sept. 24, 2026, to join the Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (MSNA/NNOC). The vote covers about 290 nurses at the hospital and landed three weeks after CMMC fired 15 nurses and suspended five more in the run-up to the election.
Firings that split into two stories
Nurses at CMMC filed for a union election in late August 2026, seeking safer staffing ratios, better equipment and improved retention at a hospital acquired earlier this year by Prime Healthcare Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the for-profit Prime Healthcare hospital chain. In the weeks that followed, hospital leadership fired 15 nurses and suspended five others — 20 employees in total. CMMC has said the actions were based on “documented violations of longstanding policies,” including patient abandonment, timekeeping violations and conduct that interferes with patient care or safety, and has denied the firings were connected to the union drive.
The Maine State Nurses Association disputes that account. The union has accused Prime Healthcare of illegally retaliating against nurses for organizing and says it is pursuing federal unfair-labor-practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board over the firings and suspensions.
The governor weighed in before the vote
Gov. Janet Mills sent a letter on Sept. 23 to CMMC’s president and CEO, Allen Stefanek, calling the firings and suspensions “unconscionable” and urging the hospital to reinstate the nurses immediately. Her intervention came the day before the vote — and around the same time a video showing several of the fired and suspended nurses playing back the voicemail notifying them of their termination went viral on social media, drawing more than 30,000 likes as the election approached.
204-21, and what happens next
The 204-21 result means roughly nine in ten ballots cast favored joining the union. It still has to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board before it is final — organizers expect that within about a week — but it stands as one of the more lopsided hospital union votes in recent Maine history, held under conditions the union itself describes as an active campaign of retaliation. As of this writing, the 20 fired and suspended nurses have not been reinstated, and no bargaining date has been set between CMMC and the newly recognized union.
Why this matters beyond Lewiston
Hospital acquisitions by large for-profit and nonprofit chains alike have become one of the more reliable predictors of a union drive in nursing — staffing ratios and equipment budgets are usually among the first things to change after a sale closes, and nurses tend to notice before anyone else does. What happened at CMMC is close to the version of that story hospital administrators hope never makes the news: a fired nurse’s termination call circulating online, a sitting governor weighing in by letter, and a vote margin that leaves little room to argue the workforce is divided about what it wants.
CMMC is not an isolated data point. Nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston authorized an open-ended strike by a 93% margin the day before this vote, in a separate dispute over staffing and pay at a much larger system. Two hospitals, two states, two ownership structures, and the same underlying complaint: nurses saying they no longer have enough voice over the conditions they work under, and administrators finding that firing the messengers tends to make the message louder rather than quieter.