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Nurses Fight to Retain Right to Unionize

An NLRB ruling undercut the rights of millions to unionize by reclassifying them as supervisors.

By David Moberg

When an organizer first talked to Kathy Haff three summers ago about joining a union, the veteran cardiac nurse at Chicago’s Our Lady of Resurrection Hospital wanted to sign up immediately. “I wanted to improve our staffing, which is lousy,” Haff says, complaining that the hospital managers assign too few nurses to care properly for the patients. “With a union,… return to article

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  • Zoom OutZoom In Reader Comments (4)

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    The war on working people and their rights continues. From the US across the OECD, the political elite daily demonstrate their arrogance and contempt for the electorate they so clearly despise. How their masters must be laughing, as they busily strip away every vestige of the post war settlement that ensured popular support for liberal democracy.

    Well there is an old saying ‘Be careful what you wish for’. The daily assault on secure employment and social rights in the Anglophone world will create a ‘pushback’ , and those that think nobody notices or cares about what is happening are set for an uncomfortable wake up call. It is simply a matter of time and organisation. You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time etc etc.

    Australia Posted by Jane Doe on Jul 27, 2006 at 11:48 PM

    Nurses are in a particularly precarious and vulnerable position as far as negotiating the conditions of their worksite, since they do not feel comfortable abandoning the patients they have made a personal commitment to care for., so they do not strike. Unfortunately, they have been, thus far, unsuccessful in impressing on others that the very strenuous and unsafe work conditions that they fight against are in the public interest as well as their own.

    A public outcry against the conditions which contribute to less than ideal patient outcomes , with poor staff to patient ratios and forced overtime leading to medication and treatment errors, is needed....

    don’t let the people who care for you and your loved ones swing in the wind on this matter.

    There’s more at stake than our job contentment here.

    United States Posted by minerva on Aug 5, 2006 at 11:00 AM

    I thought this might be interesting to some...and not even just nurses, thrashing about for some status marker ( sheesh!)…

    This is happening here, rather than some far flung nation, so it may be less poignant to those who look far afield for social injustice

    ( Can I make some stupid remark about “blue collar workers’ here?

    The posters at this site treat this North American social /economic descriptor like they might “Pygmy Bushmen from the African Plains”.

    Like ‘Blue Collar’ even means anything, anymore...we don’t have factories in the North America these days do we? Just slaves in Asian lands, and a transportation fleet that allows us to keep costs low.

    I’ll let all the RN’s at my worksite know that, in spite of their AAS, BS, MS and PhD degrees , the individual attention we give to people based on their health condition affords us ‘Assembly Line Worker’ status. I’d wax on, but we’re on such different wavelengths, it’d be pointless)

    And’s here’s what some of the ‘best minds’ have come up with, regarding the business of health treatment:..they agree that (low paid but educated) RN’s are needed to bring about better health outcomes and shorter stays, but they have no strategies to bend the health care dollar away from the administration of the system and back to the consumer....

    I’ll give you 4 ‘administrators’ for the lives of 400 of your grandmothers.

    http://www.ahrq.gov/news/press/pr2002/dilinkpr.htm

    What a sick world.

    United States Posted by minerva on Aug 5, 2006 at 4:26 PM

    And PS

    In case you didn’t know.

    We CAN’T strike without risking the licence that we’ve earned.

    If we walk off the job, they take away our nursing licence.

    Because

    we

    have abandoned

    you.

    That’s a heady responsibility for us RN’s....we among ALL the workers in any given hospital, are responsible for your health, and the outcome of your surgical procedure. Even the MD’s are not threatened with this should they choose to drop you from their caseload.

    We have no voice in the configuration of that hospital, and cannot allocate resources as we best deem, but we are held accountable, and take on more and more critical care patients , and struggle with an assembly line approach even as we judge it inferior to older nursing care models.

    But we, alone, are threatened with the loss of our licences if we complain and fret about the impact of this evolving system on our patients. We cannot strike for improved conditions in the hospital. We can only quit and move on when the whole thing becomes too shameful.

    I would like to see a few Accountant licences and MBA’s run the gauntlet of accountability and scrutiny as the nurses endure.

    It might make them take a better view of the situation.

    Because the heart and soul of a hospital is in the nursing care...and we are among the lowest paid and over worked professionals in that system.

    United States Posted by minerva on Aug 13, 2006 at 7:03 PM
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