Nurses at Edward Hospital in Naperville Want to Form a Union

Nurses at Endeavor Health Edward Hospital in Naperville, Illinois, have taken a big step toward forming a union. They filed official paperwork with a government agency called the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a union election. A union is a group of workers who join together to ask for better pay, benefits, and working conditions. The nurses say they want a stronger voice in decisions that affect both their jobs and their patients.

Elizabeth Garcia has worked as a nurse at Edward Hospital for 22 years. She said the nurses decided to push for a union because they want their opinions to matter. 'We decided we want our voices to be heard,' Garcia said. If the nurses vote yes, about 1,000 of them would be represented by a group called the National Nurses Organizing Committee.

Edward Hospital is not the only hospital in the Endeavor Health system where nurses are thinking about forming a union. Endeavor Health runs nine hospitals, and nurses at many of them have been talking about unionizing for months. They have been working with two organizations — the National Nurses Organizing Committee and Teamsters Local 743 — to help them organize. So far, nurses at the other Endeavor hospitals have not yet filed official paperwork to hold a union vote.

Nurses across the Endeavor system say they want to unionize for several important reasons. David Bernt, an organizing director for the Teamsters, said nurses are concerned about unsafe staffing levels, very heavy workloads, and pay that has not kept up with the rising cost of living. These are problems that affect not just the nurses, but also the patients they care for every day.

Garcia works in the intensive care unit (ICU), where patients are often very sick and need constant attention. She said the normal standard is one nurse for every two patients, or even one nurse for one patient when someone is extremely ill. But she said there are not always enough nurses to keep those safe numbers, making the work very difficult and sometimes dangerous.

Sometimes Garcia ends up caring for three patients at once because another unit is full and has no room to take a patient who should be moved. Caring for three ICU patients at the same time makes it very hard to give each person the attention they need. Garcia added that these difficult conditions also make nurses want to leave the hospital, which makes the staffing problem even worse.

The nurses also want better pay and benefits, but Garcia said the most important fight is about safety. She described herself as deeply connected to her community and compared herself to a 'mama bear' when it comes to protecting her patients. The petition to hold a union election was filed on a Thursday, but no date for a vote has been set yet.

The union has also filed charges against Endeavor with the NLRB, claiming that two nurses at Endeavor's Evanston Hospital were fired because of their union activities. Tricia Poreda, a nurse who travels between several Endeavor hospitals, said the staffing problems are felt across the whole system. She said that running with too few nurses means staff cannot handle unexpected emergencies or when a patient suddenly gets worse.

Endeavor Health has had serious money problems in recent years. In 2024, the hospital system lost $494 million, largely because it paid $453 million to settle lawsuits from patients who said a former doctor had abused them. Nurses also saw pay cuts in 2025 — Poreda said she personally lost $9 per hour — and she said the cuts made nurses feel undervalued.

Endeavor said it respects nurses' legal right to choose whether to have a union, and it also said it gave nurses two pay increases in 2026, adding up to about a 6% raise on average. Meanwhile, the push for unions is growing across the Chicago area, with the National Nurses Organizing Committee now representing about 9,000 nurses at hospitals including Rush University Medical Center and Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital. Many nurses across the region are asking for the same things: safer workplaces, fair pay, and the chance to be heard.