April's CR Diary

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April 4, 2007

What I've Been Writing

Sorry I've been away from the blog... I've been at my union's annual convention for three days, and there was barely a minute to get away. Also, Edward kept borrowing my computer, so be mad at him, not me!

Anyhow, here's what I've I'd been spending my creative energies on for a few days: my annual report to the convention. Thought you might find it interesting, though it's not about CR at all... it's a peek at what I do in my "real" life. I changed some of the names and details to protect those who don't want to be associated with CR! :)

Well, it’s been a pretty good year.

But more about that in a minute.

When I came to P in late 2002, P was already a successful union, but it was very much a new organization. Those of you who led your colleagues out of PSEA and formed your own, completely independent nurses’ and health care professionals’ union had three stated aims: to win excellent contracts that guaranteed the respect that nurses’ and health care professionals’ work deserves at each of your own hospitals; to become a strong, powerful and authoritative voice for nurses, health care professionals, and most importantly, patients, before our state legislature here in Harrisburg, and third, to help other nurses and health care professionals organize. To that end, you stole BC, then regional director and staff attorney for the 9000 member nurses’ union HPAE of New Jersey. He came with close to twenty years of experience in organizing, negotiating health care contracts and leading strikes against vicious employers and a reputation for being willing to do whatever it takes to make sure nurses win. He brought with him JS, who took on the task of helping Patty, Phyllis, Maureen and the rest of the leadership at T re-organize the T nurses' local and take on management in a way that T wasn’t quite used to.

By the end of 2002, you were far along with mission #1, getting great contracts. With BC’s leadership, you had worked hard to educate every nurse in your own facilities about what it means to be a union, and you had fundamentally changed your relationships with your employers to reflect the power that organized nurses can and should have. You had won standard-setting contracts in most of the P hospitals, and were finally starting to be the union you set out to become when you fled the teacher’s union.

I was lucky to join you in time for the amazing victories of 2003. I had just finished leading 1200 RNs at the largest hospital in Vermont to an organizing victory, and I was excited to join my old friends from HPAE in the project of organizing Pennsylvania. From the WB strike in February (Mental note: don’t go on strike in the Wyoming Valley in winter!) when over 2000 community members rallied on a snowy Saturday afternoon to show their support for the nurses who save their lives every day, to the monumental T nurses’ contract campaign, in which I did the internal organizing for the contract campaign while BC and JS led the fight at the negotiating table, when close to 90% of the nurses at T *voluntarily* joined the union because they understood that only by stepping up and taking ownership of their organization could they show a boss that was used to 30 years of walking all over the unions at T that they, the T nurses, demanded respect, P nurses proved to the employers of this state that nurses are a force to be reckoned with.

But winning great contracts for yourselves wasn’t your only goal. While a lot of unions would have been tempted to rest on their accomplishments – after all, having the best salaries for nurses in the state and the best retirement, to winning early retirement with health benefits and keeping health care premiums low even in a system where other nurses are paying nearly twice as) – is no small accomplishment.

But you wanted more than that. You wanted to help nurses and health care professionals who were still working as at will employees, living in fear of getting fired if they spoke up for their patients. And you didn’t just want this because you’re wonderful, caring, giving, unselfish people – though I know you are. You wanted to help others organize because you understood that only when a market share of nurses is organized can we win on the really big issues, like retiree healthcare, real pensions for nurses, and last but most importantly, safe staffing ratios in state law! You knew that the only reason why those nurses in California got nurse to patient ratios in state law was because they had already organized 90% of the market, and while it’s a daunting proposition in a state where only 15% of nurses were in unions at all, you were ready to take on the challenge because you knew that there was simply no other way to win on the big issues facing the profession.

You made hard choices in order to make P an organizing union. In 2003 you went through a long process of reforming your dues structure to both guarantee fairness and provide an adequate budget to take on the challenge of organizing. You invested in professional staff with experience in organizing in the difficult world of private sector health care, and you provided the resources to allow us to hire the best. You also volunteered your own very precious time and energy to talk to colleagues at other hospitals about the power that nurses and health care professionals can gain by organizing.

The good news is that it’s working: last year saw the largest organizing victory in P history, and indeed the second largest organizing victory in health care in Pennsylvania in ten years. The technical and professional employees at T – lab techs, respiratory therapists, social workers, dieticians, physical therapists, radiology technicians, and many others joined P, adding 550 people to our membership numbers. These professionals immediately took on T, the second richest hospital in the state, in a fast and intense contract campaign: they got their membership up to above 85%, elected a huge and representative bargaining committee of 25, and won an excellent first P contract with huge improvements in pension, salaries (including pay for experience for the first time ever!) and on-call and shift differentials… all while keeping health care premiums down to $25 per pay week for family health care. The T techs and professionals were able to follow the example of the nurses and build on the strength that six years of hard work by T nurses' local members had created to face off against a tough employer and win. The addition of these professionals greatly adds to the strength of all P members in the T system, and we look forward to the grand battle of 2009 when 2000 P members in the T system negotiate contracts at the same time.

All of our years of work to educate the nurses in our target markets about who P is and what organized nurses can do is also finally starting to pay off. Since P was born, we’ve been engaged in constant outreach to the unorganized, including speakouts on nurse issues around the state, surveys to unorganized nurses, and involving unorganized nurses in our legislative efforts to show them that P is the real voice for nurses and patients in PA. The organizing staff has made literally thousands of phone calls to unorganized nurses, attempting to engage them in conversation around our legislative efforts or educational seminars, making sure that they know that when they’re ready to talk about organizing a union, P is the union they’ll call.

Well, they’re starting to call.

The nurses at (hospital in) of Scranton, a hospital where many a union has lost elections, made the decision to organize with P. They had seen the amazing work WB nurses did to build their union and teach their boss the meaning of respect, and they wanted to do the same. So even though the majority of nurses in Northeast PA are in another union, the hospital nurses insisted that they were going with P. We filed for an election on March 16, and now we’re engaged in a long and difficult hearing where CMC management is trying to deny the right to vote to 100 nurses who take charge. The nurses are busy standing up for their rights, including going to testify before the Labor Board, in the presence of their administration… something you can imagine is scary for unorganized nurses who have no guarantee that they’ll be successful. We know that we will face an A campaign from management: the largest insurance company of Northeast PA is funding an alliance between (this hospital) and the only other unorganized hospital in town, and they’re willing to shell out a lot of cash to make sure the nurses never have a voice. We have already seen mandatory meetings, personal, one-on-one threats, and offers of special deals to individual nurses. It’s going to take intense, one-on-one contact between organizing staff and every single one of the 450 nurses, in addition to the phenomenal work staff nurses are doing to keep their co-workers educated and on board, to win this campaign. There are no guarantees – while we bring a lot of private sector health care organizing experience to these fights, we know, because we’ve been through them, that they’re terrifying, confusing ordeals for the nurses who go through them, and that even the best have the odds stacked against them. As N, 20 year organizer who has worked with us and now works for the MNA, puts it:

Our problem is that we can’t withstand an anti union campaign. The essence of which goes like this: Train the front line supervisors to get in the face of the people that work for them and then deliver this simple message. “If you vote for the union I consider it a vote against me. You figure out the rest.” Most people can, and I’d venture to say that most clear thinking people given their druthers would rather have a good relationship with their boss. Another major component of an anti union campaign is about creating an atmosphere in which rational decision making based on reasonable arguments presented by both sides becomes impossible. In fact they prefer if the only messaging comes from them. Most good consultants by the end of the campaign make it seem like a conversation with a co-worker about the union is the equivalent of physical assault or a phone call from an organizer is some sort of outrageous intrusion on your privacy.

I believe that our nurses in this hospital can withstand this anti-union campaign, with a lot of help from your organizing staff (Luke has been doing a great job as our primary organizer on the campaign) and the nurses around the state, but especially in WB, who give of their own time to offer support to their colleagues. But it won’t be easy. We hope to have an election in early summer, and by this time next year, to count this hospital as one of our newest locals!

Now onto a subject very close to the hearts of many of our delegates here today… the only unorganized hospital in the T system, after years of lagging far behind in salaries and benefits, has finally decided to organize the union! They do this in an atmosphere of extreme fear and insecurity: in January, just a month after nurses began meeting with P organizers signing union cards, T announced that it was closing the maternal child health department, eliminating the jobs of 102 nurses and closing the only hospital in northeast Philly where a mom could give birth. Now new moms have to go into the city or out to Abington, and experienced nurses were left with little more than a “See ya – bye!” to show for their years of service at J.

A 30 year NICU nurse put it best:

“These nurses have worked their entire lives, played by the rules, given up weekends and holidays, come in early and stayed late, cancelled vacations, put themselves in physical danger and through emotional trauma to care for mothers and babies. And now T has just taken away everything we worked our entire careers to build.”

The good news is that instead of running away and hiding in fear, the other nurses at J realize that they need protection and a strong voice more now than ever. On March 9, we filed for an election with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. The PLRB is known for delay, so it may be months before we have a vote. Management is already campaigning to change nurses’ minds: they’ve hired a very popular former Director of Nursing to be the face of their anti-union campaign, and she’s walking the floors and sitting at the nurses stations trying to convince nurses that very bad things will happen to them if they organize. We hope for a vote this summer, but we can be sure that management will have plenty of time to fight nurses. JW has been our primary organizer on the campaign, and she’s done an excellent job of navigating the difficult issues we’ve faced so far.

What all of this means is that all of our work, creating the climate where nurses would come to us when they were ready to fight for a voice, is paying off. Healthcare is changing, and not for the better. Nurses have to make a decision: will we organize, fight for ourselves and our patients, and risk the consequences, or will we allow our profession to be slowly destroyed? Nurses have a choice, and all over Pennsylvania, they’re finally starting to make the right choice.

We, all of us in this room, will be there to help them. You’ve already sacrificed of your own resources to help nurses you don’t know and may never meet get a voice on their jobs and protect themselves and their patients. In the next few years, we’ll all be asked to sacrifice more. Hospital administrations spend millions, literally millions of dollars on anti-union campaigns because they’re afraid that their nurses and health care professionals will get what you have: the power to affect every decision that affects your work and your patients. When nurses and health care professionals have that kind of power, health care administrators can no longer balance their budgets on the backs of the patients. They’re willing to fight hard to maintain the absolute power they’ve come to enjoy, and we have to be equal to the task. We’ll always have less money, but we have the strength of almost 5000 nurses and health care professionals who have already taken on the health care system and won… and the vision of a Pennsylvania where every nurse and every health care professional has the power to advocate for her patients, not just at the bedside but at the negotiating table and before the legislature.

I think we’re up for it. The alternatives are unthinkable. After nearly eleven years of organizing nurses and health care professionals, meeting them in diners all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania where they show up at 8:30 am after the night shift (they should be out by 7:30!) often literally in tears because they didn’t have the staff to give the care they know their patients need, I am convinced that patients in this state will not be safe until every nurse in Pennsylvania has what you have already won for yourselves: a powerful voice on the job, one that can not be ignored. I know that I, and my organizing staff, will do everything we can to help your colleagues all over this state win.

Now let’s stop chatting about it and get back to work.

Posted by april at April 4, 2007 6:20 AM

Comments

Posted by: Jennifer at April 4, 2007 7:07 AM

Posted by: Marti Smith at April 4, 2007 4:17 PM

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