ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Is it ever ethical for healthcare workers to walk off the job? When roughly 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women's Hospital — part of the Mass General Brigham system — staged the largest nursing strike in Massachusetts history, it forced a hard question: where's the line between workers' rights and a clinician's duty to the patients in the beds?
Rob and Mike work through every side of it — the one-day walkout, the multi-day lockout that followed, the contracted "registry" nurses brought in to cover, and the roughly 3.5% raise the Massachusetts Nurses Association was asking for. Then they flip the ledger: a system reporting billions in net income, with a CEO whose total compensation reached $8.4 million — the highest of any hospital executive in the state. Is a modest raise really the unreasonable ask, or does walking out on patients cross a line no paycheck can justify?
Unions, "scabbing," executive compensation, and what actually happens to patients when both sides dig in. No cheerleading, no easy answers — just an honest look at a genuinely hard call.
Join the conversation. Let's get ethical.
