CT nursing homes warn of disruption as strike deadline nears for 51 facilities

CT Insider – Friday, May 9, 2025
By Liese Klein

KellyAnn Efstathiou knows there are storm clouds on the horizon when it comes to health care in Connecticut, everything from rising costs due to tariffs to the massive Medicaid cuts proposed by national lawmakers.

But Efstathiou, a 54-year-old from Norwich, has a more immediate concern: She wants to move out of her in-laws’ home and get her own place for her family. After more than 20 years working as a certified nursing assistant at Connecticut nursing homes, she still can’t afford to rent an apartment or buy a house.

“You want to do a great job, but you also want to live,” Efstathiou said. “You just want basic necessities, and it’s just getting hard to do.”

Now Efstathiou’s union, SEIU 1199NE, has threatened a strike over demands to raise wages for certified nursing assistants and other workers to at least $25 an hour. The union voted earlier this month to strike if owners and workers can’t come to a deal by May 19.

With the strike deadline approaching, Gov. Ned Lamont met with Rob Baril, president of SEIU 1199NE, on Wednesday afternoon as negotiations continued to stall. As of publication time, no deal had been struck to forestall the strike, estimated to involve about 5,700 workers at 51 nursing homes across the state.

“This week, as conversations are ongoing, the governor met with SEIU leadership to hear their thoughts and concerns,” said Rob Blanchard, Lamont’s director of communications.

“They do some back-breaking work on behalf of the most vulnerable citizens. I’m very sympathetic to them,” Lamont said on Wednesday. “They’ve had significant increases over the last six or seven years, but nobody would say they’re well-paid.”

“These are incredibly challenging jobs,” Baril said. “These workers really went through hell during the course of the pandemic, and what they found is that their living standards are now such that people to survive can only do it by working 80, 90 to 100 hours a week.”

Most union members currently make between $18 and $22 an hour, Baril said, less than the hourly wage at fast-food jobs in many areas of Connecticut. As a result, many union members have to work long hours and even then face challenges finding housing amid escalating rents and home prices in the state.

“These are the challenges that people are dealing with, and that’s what’s got people at the place where they are ready to strike,” Baril said.

Strike negotiations

Due to the way nursing homes are paid for care, there are more than two parties involved in the strike negotiations, increasing the complexities of any deal. Taxpayers would be on the hook in part for any bump in salaries at Connecticut nursing homes, mostly in the form of increased Medicaid reimbursements to cover owners’ higher expenses.

That’s why state officials are expected to play a major role in negotiations as the deadline approaches. In 2021, Lamont helped broker a settlement between the same union and owners of 26 nursing homes, forestalling another threatened strike.

“They’re looking to the governor for a solution,” said Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, chair of the state Legislature’s Human Services Committee. “I want to be supportive … in figuring out a way to ensure that we support the workers and we get a speedy resolution that protects our residents who are living in nursing homes.”

State lawmakers have introduced bills this year to boost the minimum wage for nursing home workers to $25 an hour and raise staffing requirements at the facilities to ease the burden on workers and improve patient care.

But Baril said union leaders are counting on the governor to prioritize higher Medicaid rates to boost wages as part of the state’s budget process.

“Thus far, we’ve not seen that there’s anything close to the amount of funding that is necessary to be able to pay for contracts that raise people’s living standards,” Baril said. “There are limitations in terms of what we can get from the employers without increased funding.”

From the employers’ perspective, the threat of a strike adds to both the financial and staffing burdens already challenging the industry and pushing some homes toward closure, said Matthew Barrett, president and CEO of the Connecticut Association of Health Care Facilities.

This year’s threatened strike could be especially disruptive due to the high proportion of the state’s nursing homes impacted, about 26% of 195 facilities in operation, Barrett said. That so many contracts have expired at around the same time makes the challenge to Connecticut’s industry unique, he added.

“It creates a very powerful economic dynamic in terms of the ability to withhold labor because of all those contracts expiring at once,” Barrett said. “Connecticut has never experienced a threat of strike of this magnitude.”

The industry supports higher wages as it seeks to attract and retain workers in Connecticut, Barrett said.

“Workforce recruitment and retention, these are top issues,” Barrett said. “It’s absolutely essential that this workforce be preserved and protected and increased as we move towards the explosion of the aging population in Connecticut.”
Nursing home closures

But without higher Medicaid reimbursement rates from the state, nursing homes will close at an increasing pace if they can’t balance higher costs from wages, Barrett said. “All providers will lose ground year after year if their rates don’t keep pace with increased costs.”

Two nursing homes have closed in Connecticut since October, and a third ‒ Sheridan Woods Health Care Center in Bristol ‒ is awaiting state approval to shut down, according to the state Department of Social Services. The recent closings of Abbott Terrace in Waterbury and Countryside Manor in Bristol have cost the state 295 skilled nursing beds, and Sheriden Woods’ closure would mean the loss of another 146 beds.

A total of 1,056 beds have been lost to nursing home closures in the state since the beginning of 2023 even as Connecticut’s population ages, according to DSS statistics. Occupancy at current skilled nursing facilities stood at 88.29% as of April 29, contributing to the costly problem of hospital “boarding,” in which patients are held in hospitals for lack of nursing home beds.

“There must be a commensurate increase in Medicaid investment and Medicaid rates. The facilities are already losing ground against inflation,” Barrett said. “It really becomes an existential issue when these demands are on facilities and there’s a recognized inability to pay the increased wages.”

For certified nursing assistant Efstathiou, her inability to pay for a home of her own weighs against her love for working with nursing home residents. She has also seen cutbacks and tension on the job as the strike deadline approaches, although many workers are eager to walk the picket line, she said.

“I’m very passionate about my work,” Efstathiou said. She started working in skilled nursing at $9 an hour two decades ago and saw steady wage increases, but the rise in the cost of living expenses have far outpaced her raises in recent years.

“Back then … my children and I, we did OK. I’m not going to say great, but we did OK,” Efstathiou said. “But here we are 20 years later, and I should not be living in almost poverty.”

With additional reporting from Paul Schott.

Access this article at its original source.