Six nursing home workers stood outside the Hartford Golf Club and handed out flyers detailing the salaries of Mercy Community’s chief executive officers outside its charity golf event Monday.
The small protest, which ended at the tournament’s 11:30 a.m. tee time, was what nursing home employees described as a warning to its employer, St. Mary Home of West Hartford, which is owned and operated by Mercy Community.
“Now we don’t begrudge Bill and Steve their near $500,000 combined salary, or even their 50 percent raise since 2005,” Steve Thornton, vice president of the New England Health Care Employees Union District 1199, said. “All we are saying is we are asking for modest increases to our pension fund and wages so that the workers here can actually feed their families as well.”
The cost of registration for the annual golf fundraiser was $275 per person or $1,100 per foursome.
St. Mary Home and its 200 nursing assistants, dietary, laundry, housekeeping and other support staff have been engaged in negotiations for a new contract since February. Their contract expired in March.
St. Mary’s is not alone. Contracts with workers expired at more than 60 of the state’s nursing homes.
“It’s the rare employer that voluntarily comes to the negotiating table and lets people make progress, and its agreeable,” Thornton said. “They usually need at the very least a nudge, and sometimes they need the threat of what our main power is, which is to withhold our labor.”
Federal mediation services were called in by the employer at the beginning of the negotiations but Thornton believes they have not been playing an active role in moving the negotiations forward.
Several phone calls to St. Mary’s Home for comment were not returned.
Carmen Walker, who has worked as a nurse’s aid at St. Mary for 42 years, has been there for all of the negotiations, starting the same year St. Mary employees unionized in 1969.
Support authentic, locally owned and operated public service journalism!
“There are a lot of single mothers and there are a lot of people that need education,” said Walker. “We want to keep the benefit fund, we want to keep the educational fund, we want to keep the health fund, those are the things we need to keep for the workers.”
SEIU District 1199 has been through tough negotiations the past, including one resulting in a 13-month-long strike at four Spectrum Healthcare nursing homes in Ansonia, Derby, Hartford and Winsted.
More Health Care News & Analysis

Clinical Trials With Immunotherapy Drugs Are Source Of Hope And Challenges In Treating Aggressive Breast Cancer
Joshalyn Mills of Branford and Nancy Witz of Kensington had the best possible results after being treated in clinical trials with immunotherapy drugs for aggressive breast cancer: Their tumors were eliminated. But while there are dramatic successes with immunotherapy drugs, there are also many failures, and researchers are trying to find out why in hopes…
Keep reading
Coalition of Health Insurers Questions Viability of Connecticut Partnership Plan
Members of Connecticut’s Health Care Future, a coalition of health insurers, hospitals, and businesses, are questioning whether Connecticut lawmakers have done enough this year to protect teachers and municipal employees from increases in health insurance premiums. “Despite repeated bailouts from taxpayers, the Connecticut Partnership Plan continues to be a fiscal Titanic that demonstrates why government-controlled health…
Keep reading
AG’s Tackle Mental Health Parity
Attorneys General in Connecticut and Rhode Island threw their support Monday behind a coalition of mental health advocacy groups asking a federal appeals court to revisit a recent ruling giving insurance companies more flexibility to deny mental health claims.
Keep reading
Budget Green Lights Psychedelic Therapies
Buried in the budget Gov. Ned Lamont signed this week is a provision that would create a pilot program to allow Connecticut to be the first-in-the-nation to study the impact of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and MDMA on patients with depression and PTSD. The budget now creates a pilot program within the Department of Mental…
Keep reading
Officials Highlight Effort To Boost Mental Health Services For Kids
At a Hartford-based community provider Wednesday, Gov. Ned Lamont and a handful of his agency commissioners highlighted the expected impact of more than $100 million in recently passed funding aimed at increasing behavioral health services for Connecticut children. The governor appeared at The Village for Families and Children, a recipient of new state funding included…
Keep reading
Democrats Turn Focus To Roe v. Wade
With the legislative session and the conventions in the rearview mirror, Democrats in Connecticut are turning their focus to the U.S. Senate and the upcoming vote to codify Roe v. Wade and the impact it could have on the 2022 Elections. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was on Fox News Sunday talking about the issue, which…
Keep reading