By Jade DiGigrolamo and Tallahassee Workers Assembly
Before sunrise on the foggy mornings of April 28th and 29th, we, the Tallahassee Workers
Assembly, were in the parking lot of Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, speaking with workers
arriving for their shifts and distributing leaflets. Amid the hospital’s impending partnership with
FSU Health, the conversations we had that morning did not surprise us. What did was just how
warm and welcoming the response to our outreach was. Honking car horns responding to our
sign reading “honk for safe staffing!”, cheers and fist bumps between leafleters and workers
who—despite the early hour—were happy to engage in conversations around improving
working conditions.
By far the most frequently mentioned condition? Employee compensation. Workers had been
raising compensation concerns through internal channels for years. Those had not yet produced
meaningful results. That changed quickly after we showed up.
On Monday, May 4th, the TMH Executive Team circulated a memo acknowledging that
compensation “has been a consistent topic in colleague engagement conversations” and
announcing the engagement of a consulting partner to develop a compensation roadmap. The
memo outlined plans to benchmark roles, assess labor market data, and develop updated
salary structures across more than 750 positions.
By Friday, May 8th, all nursing staff received raises.
We celebrate this development alongside our hardworking neighbors employed by TMH. The
nurses who received raises this month earned them, and the broader review the memo
describes is an appropriate institutional response to a long-standing problem.
The memo states that completing the full compensation roadmap will take approximately six
months, and that bringing all roles to market levels will require incremental updates over several
years. The urgency applied to nursing roles should be applied equally to every category of labor
that keeps TMH functioning.
There are also matters that cannot be resolved through top-down channels. Time-and-a-half
pay, weekend differential, and sustainable working conditions are not simply line items in a
compensation structure. They are provisions that workers in comparable institutions have
secured through collective bargaining, and they represent a durable, enforceable commitment
that a memo cannot substitute for. We believe the workers of TMH deserve that same security.
TMH asks its workforce to embody its cultural values, known as ICARE, every day:
- Integrity.
- Compassion.
- Accountability.
- Respect.
- Excellence.
Those are values worth holding. The people who show up before dawn to care for patients in
this community demonstrate them constantly. We demand that TMH leadership extends the
same values to the workforce that makes this institution possible.
We encourage all TMH workers to communicate with each other: discuss wages, compare
interactions with management, and commit to collective action as the way forward. Our hope is
to organize workers across Tallahassee, especially in vulnerable institutions like TMH, and
empower them to organize for what they deserve. The Tallahassee Workers Assembly will
continue organizing and advocating for workers across this region. We are encouraged by the
steps taken this month and intend to hold this institution to the standard it claims for itself. To our
hardworking neighbors: Hold the line!
