In the U.S., the “National Labor Relations Act” generally permits employees in some industries to go on strikes, while prohibiting employees of other industries to go on strike after negotiating their terms of agreement with their employer.

We all know about the infamous writers’ strike that took over Hollywood. And, we also have followed every step of the strike among Verizon employees on news platforms across the country.

But, what does the federal law say about nurses? Can healthcare workers go on strike?

Here’s What You Need to Know

When we take a look at the law, we can understand that healthcare providers, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, counselors, as well as physical therapists are unquestionably entitled to power in their own jobs. This also means that nurses also have their own rights to protest against unfair labor conditions, just like the workers in any other industry.

But wait, do you think it is ethical to go on a strike as a nurse? If we dig deep, we can understand that nurses are much like the firefighters and police workers, who offer an essential service to the public. Without nurses and/or other hospital workers, patients would have to suffer in their pain and illness. There might be an emergency that comes up, where a patient can experience a severe complication.

So, as a nurse, you need to think about the ethical issues that come with going on strike, and who exactly it will affect. But, is there an ethical way around it?

How to go about the issue?

Unjust treatment of nurses should not be tolerable. Unjust treatment could be inadequate staffing, overexploiting, and nurses being underpaid. Not only is this detrimental to workers, it is also detrimental to patients.

But, on the other side of the coin, going on a strike in the healthcare field may seem unethical because a nurse’s primary duty is to deliver care.

So, by weighing these two aspects, we can conclude that the risk of dangers to the patients’ health outweighs the purpose of going on a strike in a majority of cases, if not in all cases. When it comes to the nursing field, the strike can be considered ethical only in exceptional circumstances.

What is the most ethical way to go about an issue?

There are several different ways of approaching an issue in an ethical way. When it comes to nurses, we can relate three types of ethical approaches, which are virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and utilitarian. Virtue ethics focus on the role of your character, rather than on the nature of your actions. This is widely accepted by the medical community for making ethical decisions.

Now, let’s try to apply this approach to whether or not nurses should go on strike.

Thomas Beauchamp and James Childress, philosophers of their time, put forward a few principles that are widely accepted by the medical community for reasons to go on strike:

• Beneficence
• Non-maleficence
• Autonomy
• Justice

A healthcare provider will go on a strike only for the purposes of being advantageous to the patients. Considering that a strike is conducted due to the complaints of inadequate staffing, exploitation, and low pay, the aim of the strike should be aligned with placing the patients’ interests in the focal point.

In this, benefits for the patients can be categorized as hard and soft. When the concern is that there are no sufficient healthcare providers to deliver quality care for the number of patients, or if the overexploitation is affecting your duties, then the aim of your negotiations will be to provide hard benefits to the patients. On the other hand, the soft benefits will be to have healthcare providers who are compensated well and satisfied with their jobs. As it is obvious, the soft benefits can be just a matter of subjective assessments, whereas the objective measures like clinical outcomes and nurse-to-patient ratios can be easily classified as sufficient or insufficient.