During an annual week celebrating nurses across the U.S, nearly 3,000 nurses at Endeavor Health in the Chicago area are working to unionize over pay cuts and what they say are unsafe working conditions.
While the effort has been quietly building for about a year, now nurses are openly organizing at work and have launched a public campaign on Instagram under the name teamsternurses. That’s a nod to the Teamsters Local 743, the union that would represent them.
“Once upon a time the nurses of North Shore were HAPPY,” one post on Instagram reads. “It was not long ago they were even called HEROES. Sadly, the nurses experienced changes as they became ruled under a new name Endeavor. It didn’t take long for the nurses to realize they were disposable to Endeavor.”
So far the unionizing effort only includes Endeavor’s so-called legacy hospitals in the suburbs — Evanston, Skokie, Glenbrook and Highland Park hospitals, said Tricia Poreda, one of the Endeavor nurses who is leading organizing efforts. Those hospitals were part of the system when it was known as NorthShore University HealthSystem, before it became much bigger through mergers. The ultimate goal is to organize nurses across Endeavor, Poreda said.
Nurses have received pay cuts of $5 to $22 an hour, amounting to thousands of dollars a year, and pay is capped for the most experienced nurses, Poreda said. That’s as executives at Endeavor get bonuses, she said.
Endeavor CEO Gerald Gallagher made just over $5 million in 2024 at the non-profit health system, including a $1.4 million bonus, as well as retirement and other “deferred” compensation, Endeavor’s most recent tax return shows. That same year, the health system had a $494 million operating loss, much of it from legal settlements, an audited financial statement shows.
Poreda, who works in the emergency department and in intensive care with the sickest patients, said what many nurses are most concerned about is being short-staffed — putting patients at risk. For example, in the ICU there’s typically one nurse treating two patients unless a patient is very critical, but without enough staff, nurses are often forced to take on more, Poreda said.
“It’s so stressful,” she said. “I make it a point to care for each and every one of my patients the way that I would want my family taken care of. … When I can’t do that, I worry about them… The last thing in the world I want is for something bad to happen because I am too bogged down with too much workload.”
WBEZ obtained fliers administrators are circulating at work that say nurses don’t have to sign a card or petition from a union.
In a statement, an Endeavor spokesperson did not comment on pay cuts or understaffing nurses but said: “Nurses are at the heart of organization.”
“We also recognize the challenges in providing safe, seamless patient care when a union acts as the intermediary between our nurses and hospital leadership,” the statement said.
Endeavor has had to grapple with safety issues recently after a patient at Swedish Hospital on Chicago’s North Side shot two police officers, according to prosecutors. One of the officers died and the other was gravely wounded. Swedish is one of nine Endeavor hospitals across Chicago and the suburbs.
Endeavor is one of the biggest hospital systems in the Chicago area, treating more than 1 million patients a year and employing more than 27,000 people, according to the health system. It generated about $6.4 billion in revenue in 2025, its most recent annual financial statement shows.
Poreda is one of several nurses who sued Endeavor last year, alleging the health system understaffs nurses to save money, compromising patient safety, and requiring nurses to routinely work beyond their shifts without pay, according to the federal lawsuit.
The lawsuit describes several instances where patients were allegedly hurt, or died because of understaffing. One patient fell and broke their hip while waiting in the emergency room, while another was given the wrong blood type during a transfusion and died, court records show.
One of the nurses alleged she was berated by a manager for helping a patient who was covered in feces, bleeding, crying and screaming, instead of discharging other patients. The same nurse alleges a human resources officer “involuntarily snatched” her cell phone and searched it after she talked with other nurses about unionizing. Then she was fired, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit is ongoing.
There’s a wave of nurses unionizing across the country. Nurses at Rush University Medical Center on Chicago’s West Side recently rallied about trying to unionize.
Kristen Schorsch covers the health of the region for WBEZ.