Pittsburgh nurses lead charge for paid leave, for everyone

By Christen Smith
The Center Square

Nurses across southwestern Pennsylvania see a simple answer to record-breaking staffing shortages and worsening healthcare outcomes for mothers and babies: paid family leave, not just for them, but for all working families.

And they don’t have any issue serving as the foundation for that call. From higher wages to paid parental leave, nurses like Lucy Rose Ruccio see no coincidence between Pennsylvania’s record nursing staffing shortage and its struggle to keep infants and mothers healthy and well.

Ruccio, flanked by her two children and soon expecting her third, pointed out the sobering statistics during a press conference for the SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania on Sunday. The union is negotiating its first contract with UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, which would include 1:1 staffing ratios for maternity care nurses and a more robust paid leave program.

In Allegheny County, where the commonwealth’s largest healthcare network is based, preterm births and low birth weights outpace the state average. Severe complications rose 55% between 2016 and 2022, most often for women using Medicaid or forgoing health insurance entirely.

It’s complicated by 20,000 unfilled nursing positions statewide, the highest rate in the country. Nationwide, healthcare providers are short by roughly 264,000.

“We are bargaining on behalf of everyone in our community, which is why we are here today,” Ruccio said. “This matters to all of us and our united advocacy will have reverberating impacts for generations to come.”

But it’s not just within UPMC hospitals that SEIU nurses from the region want change. Advocates have appeared before the Allegheny County Council to urge officials to implement a countywide program. Others have stumped for the proposal at the state capitol and even at the Washington, D.C., office of U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat who lives in Braddock, an eastern Pittsburgh suburb.

Michelle Hart, a neonatal nurse practitioner at Magee-Womens Hospital, was one of those union members. Despite avoiding politics for most of her 30 years in the profession, Hart said the “severe decline” in maternal and infant healthcare forced her hand.

“It hurts my heart to see moms and babies struggling with serious complications when these problems could be addressed by increasing funding and improving the support, recruitment, retention and staffing of nurses,” she said during her D.C. visit on April 28.

Hart then pointed to something that many critical of working conditions in hospitals mention often: healthcare is big business, and UPMC is the biggest in Pennsylvania.

In 2025, the hospital system pocketed more than $643 million in excess revenue. It also benefits from property tax exemptions as a nonprofit and collects millions in federal research grants.

The Center Square was unsuccesful prior to publication in its attempt to contact UPMC for comment.

“Usually, elected officials only hear from big healthcare corporations that spend millions on professional lobbying firms,” Hart said. “This is our time as nurse advocates to unleash our power and take a stand for our patients and profession.”

Their voices aren’t going unheard. Paid family leave proposals have permeated local, state and federal governments. In March, the state House of Representatives voted 107-92 to approve legislation that would provide 12 weeks of partial wages for state workers taking leave for personal or family situations.

Although all but one Democrat voted the bill, seven Republicans defected across party lines in support: Republican Rep. Joe Emrick of Northampton County; Reps. Valerie Gaydos and Natalie Mihalek of Allegheny County; and Reps. Joe Hogan, Kathleen Tomlinson and Shelby Labs of Bucks County.

The remaining 92 Republicans objected to the cost of the proposal: an anticipated $4.5 billion, mostly from small businesses.

During the March 25 debate in the House, Tomlinson said she was voting “yes” only to indicate support for the concept. The bill itself, she said, underwent a major change before the final vote that was carried out without consulting the Senate.

She predicted the bill would “go nowhere” in the Senate and said, “We could have worked better with the other chamber and had some discussions.”

The Republican-majority Senate isn’t completely against the idea, however. Devlin Robinson, an Allegheny County senator, has also crafted a bill on paid family leave that is awaiting action in the Labor and Industry Committee, of which he serves as majority chairman. It was first introduced nine months ago and a bipartisan group constituting 60% of the Senate have signed on as co-sponsors.

A federal law, the Family and Medical Leave Act, was enacted in 1993.

Better known as FMLA, it guarantees job protection to workers who must take leave for family or medical reasons. But it includes no compensation and only covers private-sector employers with 50 or more workers.

Federal employees already receive 12 weeks of paid family leave, though a universal program has yet to gain traction.

And although the recent expansion of federal childcare tax credit amounts have increased under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the president’s push for caregiver credits was not part of it.

The Magee nurses who visited Washington D.C. lobbied for federal changes too that would bolster the nursing workforce and improve maternal healthcare.

Ford Turner contributed to this report.