After a week-long strike, more than 2,000 nurses at Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center returned to their shifts at 6:59 a.m. on Feb. 26 — locked out of their medical record charts by the medical center, with zero contact from hospital administration.
Now, more than a month later, an end to the labor dispute is still nowhere in sight for Keck nurses, who are frustrated with the university’s bargaining.
Bargaining between the California Nurses Association and Keck Hospital of USC has been ongoing since early 2025, when the nurses’ previous collective bargaining contract expired.
The nurses were striking over USC’s restructuring of their employee health care plans. The strike lasted seven days, from Feb. 19 to Feb. 26, outside Keck Hospital.
“It’s the last option that we have,” said Chief Nurse Union Representative Rudy Cuellar, a cardiothoracic ICU nurse who has worked at Keck for almost 30 years.
Despite multiple attempts to get Keck to “come to the table,” the bargaining team and the hospital have made no progress on a new contract since the strike, said Cuellar. Any offers that Keck Medicine does send are “nowhere near what we need,” said Cuellar.
This is the second time nurses have gone on strike since contract negotiations began in May 2025. The first strike centered on better wages and appropriate resources for nurses; it started Oct. 30, 2026 and lasted one day.
Nurses did not expect to strike a second time. But the length of negotiation has left Cuellar and other nurses feeling like the university does not “value the nurses.”
“Keck Medicine of USC has bargained in good faith, and Keck Medicine agreed to work with a federal mediator to facilitate discussions before the strike,” said Keck Medicine in a statement to Annenberg Media.
Prior to the contract’s expiration, nurses had access to a free Anthem HMO plan, which, according to Keck Nurse Zeinoon Malaeb, “many nurses liked.”
Malaeb explained that the HMO plan had no premium costs and allowed nurses to see physicians in their own communities, which was important to many nurses who live outside the USC area. The changes to the health plan have left many nurses and their loved ones cut off from their health care providers and forced to seek care at USC facilities.
The hospital will not restore the HMO plan until nurses agree to its proposed terms — terms that Malaeb describes as offering “bottom of the market raises.”
The bargaining team is seeking wages that match those of Keck Hospital’s competitors. UCLA’s hospital system ratified its contract, which includes an 18.5% increase to the minimum wage over four years, with nurses on Nov. 22, 2025.
Malaeb said USC’s best offer was 12.15%, which he called “frustrating” because the hospital has not set bargaining dates.
“In my opinion, and in the opinion of the majority of nurses, the reason behind that is to tire us out so that we get frustrated,” Malaeb said. “And if we’re frustrated and tired out, we’ll just accept any deal that they are offering us instead of a good deal that we deserve.”
Things were not better when the strike ended.
USC’s preparation for the strike included cutting off all nurses’ access to USC’s network, including work emails, time card software and – most importantly – the patient charting software. When nurses resumed their shifts on Feb. 26, they were still locked out of those patient charts. The lockout caused a delay of more than two hours while the IT department worked to restore access for nearly 2,000 nurses.
Keck Medicine did not respond to specific requests for comment regarding the health system’s strike preparations.
Nathaniel, a registered nurse at Keck Hospital, who was granted partial anonymity due to concerns about job security, recalled the chaotic day nurses returned from the strike.
“Our nurses showed up. They didn’t receive in-person reports on their patients, which is not the standard practice,” he said. On top of that, Keck nurses were unable to conduct a proper handoff with the replacement strike nurses who had worked during the seven-day strike.
“Several operations had to be delayed because the caregivers did not have access to the medical records,” Malaeb said.
Nathaniel felt the whole situation “was not safe, and the hospital had no plan to deal with it.”
With how the university has handled these negotiations, nurses are worried about what continued labor struggles could bring.
“Once you start treating nurses as disposable parts, I think they’re going to stop seeing the hospital as a valued partner,” Nathaniel said.
Keck Medicine is known for its top rankings in various surgical specialties, high safety scores and strong patient satisfaction ratings. But Nathaniel says, “You can’t maintain that if you don’t maintain the nursing staff.”
The nurses are hoping for an agreement soon, but ongoing labor disputes could lead to more strikes. The bargaining team and the federal mediator have plans to meet on April 17 and May 4, according to Cuellar.
“We are not asking for anything unreasonable,” Malaeb said. “We are just asking to be treated the same.”
So long as nurses are still working at Keck Hospital of USC, Cuellar said, the university “needs to treat us like members of the Trojan family.”