Nurses at Brigham and Women's Hospital are heading to a strike authorization vote on June 16, the Massachusetts Nurses Association announced on June 9. The vote follows more than seven months and 19 bargaining sessions that have produced, as of this writing, zero wage increases for the majority of nurses at one of Boston's flagship academic medical centers.
Zero Wages for Most Nurses, $35.9M for Executives
The MNA's core complaint is straightforward: Mass General Brigham has offered 0% wage increases for nurses below the top step of the pay scale. For some nurses, this is the first time in 28 or more years that their employer has offered no cost-of-living adjustment whatsoever. At the same time, MGB's top 10 executives collected a combined $35.9 million in FY2024 compensation — CEO Dr. Anne Klibanski alone earned $8.4 million.
"Nurses are being told there is no money to provide wage increases," the MNA said in a statement, "but MGB somehow found $35.9 million to pay its top executives."
MGB is also proposing substantial increases to nurses' health insurance costs and has declined to support any limits on travel nurse usage — both issues the union has pushed hard on. The closure of the Weiner Center, which shifted specialized preoperative services to another facility, is cited as a patient continuity disruption that nurses are also raising at the table.
What the Vote Means
A strike authorization vote does not mean a strike is happening — it gives the union's executive board the authority to call one. If the vote passes, MNA must give the hospital 10 days' notice under Massachusetts state law before any walkout can begin. That 10-day window exists to allow patient care continuity preparation and, historically, last-minute negotiations.
The vote is scheduled for Tuesday, June 16 from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. at locations near the BWH Longwood area campus. If authorized and then exercised, it would be the first nurses' strike at Brigham and Women's in decades. BWH is a 793-bed tertiary academic medical center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and one of the top cardiac surgery and organ transplant centers in the country. It is not a facility that can absorb a nursing strike without significant operational impact.
The Broader Massachusetts Picture
This isn't happening in isolation. Baystate Franklin nurses in western Massachusetts voted in April 2026 to authorize a potential strike over pay disparities between Baystate facilities. The ANA affiliate Massachusetts Nurses Association is simultaneously engaged in multiple active contract fights across the state, which is a real strain on union bandwidth. If both Baystate Franklin and BWH go to the wall simultaneously, the MNA is managing a two-front labor action at two high-profile hospitals.
The backdrop is a Massachusetts nursing labor market that has been under pressure since the COVID surge normalized travel nurse pay at rates that make staff nurse compensation look increasingly unattractive. MGB's decision to hold the wage line while running a multi-billion-dollar system is either a principled cost discipline move or a miscalculation of nurse tolerance — the June 16 vote will start to answer which.
BWH nurses have lived under a no-strike tradition for decades. MGB is betting they'll fold again. Seven months of talks, 0% wages, and $35.9M in executive pay is a durable set of facts to bring to a vote. The question isn't whether nurses are angry — it's whether they're angry enough to walk out of a hospital mid-contract cycle. June 16 answers that.
For nurses watching from outside Massachusetts: the structural math here is not unique to Brigham. Post-pandemic hospital systems across the country rebuilt their nursing workforces with travel nurse spending that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars — and are now deploying the savings from normalized travel rates into executive compensation and system expansion rather than staff nurse wages. The MGB executives didn't build that $35.9M compensation package in one year; the nurses at BWH are the ones making the argument visible.
The outcome of the June 16 vote will carry weight beyond Boston. If Brigham nurses vote yes and the MNA ultimately calls a strike at one of the most famous hospitals in the country, it becomes a national story about what hospital systems believe they owe the nurses who kept their facilities running through three years of pandemic chaos. If they vote no or fold in final bargaining, it reinforces the calculation that experienced nurses at legacy institutions can be held below cost-of-living indefinitely without consequence.