PhysEmp Insights

About 200 nurse practitioners and physician assistants at UI Health in Chicago could walk off the job on or after Nov. 11. Their union, SEIU Local 73, issued a 10-day notice after members voted in October to authorize a strike, according to Medical Daily. The trigger is small in dollars and large as a signal: a 2% raise that took effect in August for other campus workers but not for these providers, who the union says have gone more than two years without a raise or cost-of-living adjustment.

For anyone following Physician & Advanced Practice Jobs, the notice belongs to a pattern that tends to get reported one hospital at a time. NPs and PAs have been organizing at very different employers this year, and pay that stalls while the employer contests whether a union even exists keeps turning up near the center of it.

The UI Health dispute is mostly procedural, which is what makes it useful to study. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board certified the union in July 2025. The university is challenging that certification in court, and in June 2026 the Fourth District Appellate Court granted a stay that paused the university’s duty to bargain. The Illinois Supreme Court declined to intervene. Before the stay, the two sides bargained from January to June and reached several tentative agreements, which the union said in July covered nearly all non-economic provisions.

UI Health’s position is that the notice does not mean a strike will happen, that it considers a strike unlawful while the court order stands, and that it has contingency plans to keep University of Illinois Hospital & Clinics running. The union’s list goes beyond the raise to pay transparency and equity, safe staffing, meal breaks and use of earned sick time. “We would much rather settle this at the table than on a picket line,” Local 73 President Dian Palmer said.

The patient base raises the stakes. Sarah Ehrhardt, a PA, said in the union’s July release that the vast majority of the patients these providers serve are on Medicaid, and the union has tied the dispute to federal Medicaid cuts.