06/15/2026
🔥⚡️✊🏾UE150 in the NEWS: 🔥⚡️✊🏾
Mental health workers from multiple N.C. Department of Health and Human Services facilities, including Central Regional Hospital and the Murdoch Center, rallied at Butner’s Gazebo Park last week, demanding better pay and safer staffing conditions and an end to North Carolina’s continued reductions to corporate tax rates.
“The pay has gotten so bad that I don't know anybody that works at Murdoch that doesn't have to have a second job to survive,” Thomas Harris, who has worked at the Murdoch Center for 10 years, said.
Employees at the rally said that they received a 0% raise last year, and only a 3% retention raise this year. The raise also comes with the requirement to remain at the job for 12 months after to keep the entire sum. Employees who leave before then have to pay part of the amount back.
Harris also said that he was denied even the 3% retention raise, due to a disciplinary action that occurred over a year ago.
“Workers are having to choose between paying their rent, getting their medicine, paying for child care, and it shouldn't be. They come and do all of this work in dangerous workplaces,” Tremaine Toney, a union organizer at the Union of Southern Service Workers, said. “Something could happen, and you want to give them $10, $15 an hour to come work in a facility where there's murderers and crazy people and things like that, but you don't want to give them the money.”
In comparison, those at the rally noted that law enforcement and other correctional officer positions have received significantly larger pay increases, as many of the roles advance on a step payment plan. N.C. Governor Josh Stein has also continued to push for a pay raise for correctional officers to address shortages.
For the many mental health workers facing staffing shortages of their own, however, it feels like they are being left behind.
“We've seen over the last five years our nursing staff, especially, just leave in droves, so we're trying to run a hospital with a lot of agency nursing staff instead of state employed, experienced nursing staff,” Rakesh Patel, a physician at Central Regional Hospital, said. “When we were a fully staffed hospital, we had 390 patients, and now we're down to about 270. We have 120 empty beds here.”
Patel, who has worked at Central Regional for 18 years, said the state is committing “financial malpractice,” and using temporary agency nursing workers, which cost significantly more than registered nursing staff since they are supplied through an agency, instead of providing competitive pay to full-time state-employed nursing staff.
“Our registered nurse vacancy rate is 70%,” he said. “Seven zero.”
Patel said he has met with legislators, including former NCDHHS Secretary Kody Kinsley and current Secretary Devdutta Sangvai, and they have acknowledged the issues, but no action has been taken to address them.
He worries that the mismanagement of money will be used to justify the hospital’s closure, and said that as long as the focus is profit when it comes to mental health care, funding issues will continue to exist, since mental health care is not a particularly profitable field of medicine.
“Unless you want to close these facilities, all you're doing is you're spending way more than you need to to get second rate care,” Patel said.
“The corporate tax rate is going to go to zero by the end of the decade, and the individual tax rate is going down, and so when you look at the state budget, next year is going to be worse than this year, because less revenue is coming in,” he added.
Rallying workers say they want to see more people coming out to protests, and they want to have a larger sit-down conversation with DHHS.
“Ain't nothing we can do about it, except what we're doing right now. We need more out here,” Charles Owens, employee at the Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro and vice president of the Cherry-O’Berry North Carolina Public Service Workers Union chapter, said. “10, 20 people, we can say some stuff. Two, three hundred–they gotta listen now.”
NC mental health workers rally in Butner over low pay, dangerous staffing shortages and tax cuts, warning of vacant beds and costly reliance on temp agency nurs...
