April's CR Diary

This hospital was always at the head of the pack when it came to taking from nurses and patients. In 1993, it led the way among hospital employers in eliminating nurses’ defined benefit pension plan, replacing it with a much inferior “Cash Balance” plan. In 1998, nurses tried to organize to stop the cuts, contacting our predecessor, PSEA. They got very little support from the union, and the nurse leaders of the campaign were largely left on their own to do the best they could. Two years later they contacted another union, who ran a serious campaign but fell just short of a victory. Management’s expensive consultants scripted every meeting that managers and executives conducted with nurses, making promises they never had any intention of keeping. The nurses who led the fight suffered a heartbreaking defeat. It’s hard to imagine, if you’ve never been there, what it’s like to go into the hospital the day after a losing vote. The knowledge that you have to work, day after day, for an employer who lied to you and your co-workers, and that you have no security, either for your job or your benefits, is terrifying. Brave nurses who staked their reputations and their careers on the hope of organizing the union saw their dreams of a real voice on the job slip away as the votes were counted. They had no way of knowing, in 2000, that seven years later all the effort they made would pay off in the biggest organizing victory Pennsylvania had seen in a decade.

The first challenged in helping nurses to organize at a facility that has suffered many losses is to get past the sense of futility and despair that follows a failed campaign. New leaders had to emerge who were willing to take on the struggle of organizing their co-workers. And emerge they did – many of them from among those who had voted “No” in two previous elections. They saw management’s broken promises with their own eyes, and they knew it was time for nurses to stand up for themselves. Nurses who had given their entire adult life to the hospital – working overtime, holidays, weekends, giving up time with their families – had been “rewarded” with stagnating salaries, reductions in holidays and sick time, and draconian cuts in pension and health care. Meanwhile, new nurses were entering the hospital only to find short staffing and lack of ancillary help made it impossible for them to give the care they were trained to deliver. Nurses joined together from across the floors and units, bridging the barriers between experienced and junior staff, to stand up as one voice.

The final straw was probably administration’s decision, a few months before the organizing campaign began in earnest, to lay off very senior employees. As these nurses and other staff were escorted out of the building like criminals, rather than as dedicated community members who had given years of service to the hospital, nurses around them said, “Enough is enough!” When a nurse with thirty year of experience has to fear for his or her job, it’s time for nurses to take back the power that administration has so badly misused.

One of the main reasons why these nurses called us was that they saw the success of the nurses at (hospital in the next town over) in securing excellent contracts in the face of tremendous management opposition. The nurses knew they needed to join a union that would never stop fighting until nurses won the respect they deserve, and the strike of 2003, where nurses stood up for their patients and received overwhelming support from their community, was an inspiration.

The administration retained (name deleted) one of the nation’s most notorious anti-union consulting firms, for over ten years in order to keep its nurses unorganized. The nurses were unpersuaded by the union buster’s lies – mostly because they had been lied to before. They stood up time and time again and questioned management in round the clock mandatory meetings, where they were pulled away from patient care at all hours of the day and night to listen to the CEO and Director of Nursing lie about the union.

Worst of all, the nurses had to endure a three week hearing at the National Labor Relations Board in order to even win the right to a vote! Changes in labor law put forth by George Bush’s labor board opened the door to hospital employers to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to contend that every nurse who takes charge on the floor is a supervisor! Nurses had to get up and testify before the Board – in front of their Director of Nursing and nurse managers – to prove that they are not in fact supervisors. With no guarantees that they would win union protection, or even that there would be a vote, more than a dozen nurses testified before the Board, and were supported by over forty of their co-workers who attended the hearings.

Staff organizer Luke worked with the nurses throughout the campaign. Nurses frequently remarked on Luke's professionalism and accessibility. He was joined in the last months by new organizer Lisa, who excelled in her first organizing assignment.

“It’s impossible to explain what it means to lose a campaign,” said Director of Organizing April Smith, who made the decision to commit our resources to the Scranton effort and led the campaign. “When people have been through a loss, you just can’t put them through that again. I wasn’t going to run this campaign unless I was sure of a win. When I met and got to know the nurses at (hospital x), especially those who had fought for so many years to win the union, I knew this was a group of nurses who could not only withstand management’s campaign, but who would eventually become one of the strongest locals of the organization. We should all be proud to count them among our members.”