Registered nurses at Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital plan an 8 a.m. rally outside the hospital on Wednesday, May 27, days after parent operator Prime Healthcare terminated four nurses the union says were targeted for leafleting at the staff entrance.
The four were fired within days of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/NNU filing a petition for a representation election with the National Labor Relations Board. Leafleting on staff-side entrances is a longstanding protected concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act, and the NLRB has repeatedly ruled that disciplining workers for it is unlawful.
NNOC said it has filed unfair-labor-practice charges and is demanding the four nurses’ reinstatement, a fair and timely union election, and a halt to what it calls anti-union conduct by hospital management. Saint Mary employs more than 400 RNs.
The action is the latest in a Chicago organizing wave that has accelerated through May. On May 18, more than 2,000 RNs at Rush University Medical Center voted to join NNOC after a multi-year campaign — a result this paper covered last week.
The timing — firings within days of a representation petition — is a pattern labor attorneys say frequently shows up in NLRB unfair-labor-practice complaints, and is one of the harder fact patterns for an employer to defend on the merits. Prime Healthcare did not respond to a request for comment by publication.
Source: National Nurses United / National Nurses Organizing Committee statement, May 26, 2026.
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