Nurses in Michigan would be guaranteed eight consecutive hours of time off after working a 12-hour shift, under legislation by Sens. Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit) and Ed McBroom (R-Waucedah Twp.).

“It pains me that after decades of nurses organizing and mobilizing for safer guardrails, so little has truly changed,” said Kimberly Rackley, a fourth-generation nurse working at Borgess Health in Kalamazoo.

Rackley testified in support of SB 296 and SB 297 in front of the Senate Regulatory Affairs Committee this morning, which heard testimony on the legislation. Rackley described working as part of an open-heart surgical team, and how the team must be available 24 hours daily in order for the hospital to maintain its Level II Trauma Center status.

“We are often scheduled long over our scheduled shifts, because we stack surgery after surgery, up to three, four or five surgeries a day sometimes,” Rackley said. “This will go on for days and weeks on end. This is not sustainable.”

She said that since joining her team in November 2023, it has lost nine nurses, while gaining one nurse and one surgical technician. She explained the reasons the nine left are consistent.

“We are overworked and exhausted, stretched beyond what is safe,” she said, adding that when she’s not on the clock, she’s caring for a coworker’s child, “so that she could go take her call and do surgery.”

Chang told the committee that today’s proposals go back to previous state Sen. Tom Casperson, the Escanaba Republican who represented the Upper Peninsula from 2011 through 2018 in the Senate. Casperson spent 35 combined years working at and owning his family’s log trucking business.

As the government limits working hours for truck drivers, airline pilots and locomotive drivers, Chang said “the same should be the case for nurses who provide the most direct and hands-on care in hospital settings.”

For example, federal rules require that the majority of commercial truck drivers not drive beyond the 14th consecutive hour from the start of their shift. They are also barred from working more than 60 hours in seven days, or more than 70 hours over eight days.

As of 2016, Illinois law has provided nurses eight hours of rest following 12 consecutive hours of work, with certain emergency exceptions. Nurses in the state are also prohibited from working four hours beyond their scheduled shift.

Similarly, Maine, Washington state, West Virginia and Texas laws ensure that nurses have the right to refuse overtime without fear of retaliation. Meanwhile, Oregon bans healthcare employers from requiring staff members to work more than 48 hours in one week or more than 12 consecutive hours daily.

The 2025 Survey of Michigan Nurses, affiliated with the state’s health department, found that 53.7% of licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and 24.7% of registered nurses (RNs) worked overtime at least once a month. In the long-term care setting, 45.9% of LPNs and 37.2% of RNs were faced with overtime at least once monthly.

According to the report – which surveyed 11,131 RNs in the state – RNs working in the anesthesia specialty had the most nurses who indicated they worked overtime one month or more at 34.7%.

Under SB 296 and SB 297 , hospitals would require nurses to work an extra two hours – or four hours if it’s a rural hospital – after their regularly scheduled or on-call hours if an RN could “not be relieved due to unexpected circumstances.”

Hospitals would additionally be prohibited from taking disciplinary action against an RN who refused to work beyond their regularly scheduled or on-call hours. Collective bargaining agreements in effect while the bills were implemented would supersede the reforms until the union deal expired.

Another testifier was Lansing-based Katie Pontifex, who previously worked 12 years as an intermediate care registered nurse within the Sparrow Health System (now University of Michigan Health-Sparrow).

She is now the associate executive director of healthcare practice, policy and strategic initiatives for the Michigan Nurses Association.

“I’m a fifth-generation nurse, and … grew up spending much of my free time in the hospital alongside my mom, back in the days (when) Take Your Daughter to Work Day was welcomed in every professional setting,” Pontifex said. “Almost 17 years into the profession, I’ve personally experienced how unsafe staffing practices and mandatory overtime have pushed experienced nurses, my own colleagues, out of the workforce.”

Pontifex said the working conditions were the reason her decision to leave direct patient care nearly four years ago was so easy, as she transitioned from union leadership into her current role.

The bills were opposed today by the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, which described them as an “arbitrary one-size-fits-all” staffing mandate in a place where “patient-focused clinical (decision-making) and individual team-based approaches should be prioritized.”

This story courtesy of MIRS, a Lansing-based news and information service.