An effort is underway by Service Employees International Union Local 49 to unionize Asante employees.

Nurses at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford have overwhelmingly approved a new labor contract that offers substantial raises and curtails the hospital’s use of travel nurses.

Represented by the Oregon Nurses Association, the Asante nurses voted Friday through Monday on whether to ratify an agreement the bargaining team had tentatively reached with hospital administration Oct. 27.

Of Rogue Regional’s roughly 960 nurses, about 800 cast a ballot — and 99.2% of them favored the contract, according to David Baca, a registered nurse in Rogue Regional’s emergency department and negotiator on the bargaining team.

“It’s a wonderful result that a lot of hard work was put into, on both sides,” Baca said in an interview.

The parties had been negotiating since early July.

Under the new agreement, nurses’ hourly wages will go up by $10 retroactive to Sept. 30, when the current contract expired. The nurses will also receive a 4% cost-of-living increase in 2024, then another 4% increase in 2025.

The starting wage for Asante nurses is $39.92 an hour. The new contract will immediately give them $49.92 an hour. With the two cost-of-living increases, that wage will rise to $53.99 an hour.

Asante’s most experienced nurses will see $61.92 an hour jump to $71.92 — then, with two cost-of-living increases, to $77.79 an hour.

The wage hikes will bring Asante nurses’ pay more in line with their counterparts’ at St. Charles Bend and Oregon Health and Science University, according to Kevin Mealy, an ONA spokesperson.

The nurses hope the wage hikes will help Asante retain and attract more staff — and begin to remedy what many view as unsafe staffing levels, a concern that the new contract does not directly address.

Rogue Regional is short more than 300 nurses and will eventually have to hire more as the hospital opens its new patient pavilion next year.

Baca said, “Especially over the pandemic, we saw a lot of our colleagues leave the area for, first, travel contracts — pandemic contracts — and then, secondly, just as pay increased around the state but remained the same here.”

The contract caps how many travel nurses Rogue Regional can employ, a provision meant to prioritize staff nurses over travelers. The number of travel nurses at the hospital cannot exceed 10% of the number of ONA-represented staff nurses there.

In addition, travel nurses who work 12 or more months at the hospital in an 18-month period must become staff nurses.

Travel nurses, who fill positions in hospitals for temporary periods, often earn wages several times those of staff nurses. Long used when staff nurses go on family or medical leave, travel nurses took on a larger role during the coronavirus pandemic, as demand for patient care skyrocketed and many hospitals experienced chronic staffing issues.

Mealy said, “We overused travelers to the point that it was sort of creating its own ouroboros” — the image of a snake devouring its own tail. “Nurses were saying, ‘Well, why don’t I become a traveler and make four or five times as much?’”

Some travel nurses at Rogue Regional have had their contracts repeatedly extended, suggesting that the hospital could use permanent employees in those positions, Mealy said.

“If this isn’t truly a short-term temporary fix, let’s hire someone long-term,” Mealy said.

When Baca last checked the numbers several weeks ago, Rogue Regional had contracts with about 130 travelers, he said. The hospital will not immediately start phasing out travel nurses, he said.

“We’re not looking for a reduction in travel staff at this time because, to be honest with you, they help fill the patient care needs,” he said.

The new contract also limits the practice of “floating,” where hospitals move nurses from their “home” department — women and children’s health, for example — to a department outside their specialty, like the emergency department.

The contract does not improve the nurses’ company health benefits — another aspiration of the bargaining team — but creates an Asante-wide “benefits council” for nurses to discuss concerns with their health plans with hospital administrators and specialists.

The bargaining team had also hoped to win more holidays but was unsuccessful.

The new contract expires in October 2026.

The hospital declined to comment. “Asante does not publicly discuss personnel matters of employees including terms and conditions of employment,” Lauren Van Sickle, Asante communications manager, said in an email.

In September, Asante nurses, including Baca, began getting text ads that indicated Southern Oregon was in for a nurses strike. The ads were from Medical Solutions, a Nebraska-based company that helps connect travel nurses with health facilities.

One ad said the company was staffing for a potential strike and that Oregon-licensed registered nurses could make $7,380 to $8,200 per week. Another ad offered housing and transportation to recruits.

Baca and his team figured the ads were for another hospital, one further along the road to a strike. “The word ‘strike’ never came out of our mouths,” he said.

The bargaining team asked about the ads at a negotiation session. Hospital representatives, “very nonchalantly,” affirmed that the call for strike nurses was for Asante, Baca said.

“I remember that as a moment where we were all taken aback,” he said.

Baca recalls the hospital reps saying that Asante had the right to be prepared in case of action.

“If strike nurses get an $8,000-a-week contract, and you’re willing to pay strike nurses $8,000 a week, you should be using those energies and efforts toward getting a contract with us for the next three years,” Baca said, “because we’re the core staff that have been here and will continue to be here — work through the pandemic, work with you.

“We’re part of this community.”