RNs Chart Course for New National Nurses Organization
Leaders of 60,000 RNs Adopt Principles, Goals for New Group
Leaders of nurses' organizations representing over 60,000 registered nurses in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Missouri met in Baltimore today to chart a course for creating a new national organization of direct care RNs.
Top elected representatives of the California Nurses Association, Massachusetts Nurses Association, Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, Maine State Nurses Association, and United Health Care Workers of Greater St. Louis, participated in the Baltimore meeting.
Together the RN leaders endorsed the goal of establishing a national organization, a patient advocacy set of principles and initial actions each group will recommend to its members for adoption. The next meeting of the leaders will be June 22 in Chicago.
Key goals include initiating national legislation to address the specific needs of direct care nurses, such as HR 1289, a national bill to ban mandatory overtime that the groups are already sponsoring, and promoting union organizing of unrepresented nurses.
One first step would be to establish an organizing institute to train nurse activists on how to achieve union representation in non-union facilities and to assist collective activity for nurses who are already represented.
Among other functions would be to coordinate communications, public relations, education and research, and support for collective bargaining campaigns, especially in battles with multi-state employers.
Proposed principles of the new organization include:
* Establishing a progressive national voice of nurses.
* Protecting, preserving and promoting RN practice, such as requiring safe staffing and opposition to deskilling and intrusion on RN scope of practice.
* Autonomy and independence of the individual member organizations.
* Support for universal health care, with establishment of a single-payer style national healthcare program.
* Unionization of any RNs throughout the U.S. who desire representation.
* Solidarity with international nurses organizations that share similar goals and values.
Leaders of the groups enthusiastically welcomed the results of the meeting.
"It's time to build a new, powerful national voice for the nurses who are on the front line providing hands on patient care 24 hours a day," said CNA President Kay McVay, RN. "With the relentless assault by managed care and the health care industry on patient care conditions and working nurses, it is vital that nurses have their own organization to advocate for the changes we need for our patients and our profession."
"Today's step will fill the long existing void for the voice of the Registered Nurses providing direct care," said Denise Garlick, RN, President of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. "As nurse activists and patient advocates, the MNA welcomes the new progressive and unequivocal voice to be expressed by clear initiatives targeted to meet the needs of direct care nurses and their patients."
"Nurses and their organizations are building new alliances with one another and the public to once again have a health care system that places patients before profits and the bottom line," said Teri Evans, RN, president of PASNAP.
"Maine nurses want national visibility," said Pat Philbrook, RN, executive director of the Maine State Nurses Association. "We're looking for partners that share our goals: a ban on mandatory overtime, a ban of latex gloves to prevent allergies to patients and nurses, nurse patient ratios according to acuity, and money for nursing education loans."
"UHCW is proud to have the opportunity to work on a national level with some of the most progressive nurse leaders in this nation" said Sharon Penrod, RN, UHCW President. "This new organization will be instrumental in establishing health care reform and gaining respect and dignity that nurses deserve. Florence Nightingale would be proud."
"I see this as an exciting time with staff nurses standing strong and united nationally," said Karen Higgins, RN, chair of the MNA's Cabinet for Labor Relations. "We are moving forward, taking a progressive stand in the health care arena to assure patients safe care, and that nurses will be at the bedside delivering that care."
The move to create a new national organization follows recent votes by both the Massachusetts and Maine RNs to disaffiliate from the American Nurses Association, an organization both groups said does not adequately address the concerns of direct care nurses. MNA members voted by 83%, Maine nurses by 89% to leave the ANA.
HR 1289, which would prohibit mandatory overtime for licensed health care employees, typifies a more forceful approach, that the organizations say is needed to crack down on dangerous working conditions that threaten patient safety and drive frustrated nurses away from the hospital bedside contributing to a national hospital nursing shortage. Reps. Tom Lantos (D-CA), James McGovern (D-MA), and Hilda Solis (D-CA) introduced the bill at the request of CNA, MNA and PASNAP.
Similarly, the organizations are exchanging information and assisting with national and statewide approaches to require safe staffing standards, and other legislation, nursing practice reforms, and collective bargaining strategies to improve patient care conditions, and the ability of nurses to advocate for their patients.
Contacts:
Charles Idelson, California Nurses Association, 510-273-2246.
David Schildmeier, Massachusetts Nurses Association, 781-830-5717 or 781-249-0430.
Teri Evans or Bill Cruice, Pennsylvania, 610-567-2907.
Pat Philbrook, Maine State Nurses Association, 207/622-1057.
Sharon Penrod, Missouri, 314-531-2900.
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Brockton nurses vow to strike over hiring
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/144/metro/Brockton_nurses_vow_to_strike_over_hiring+.shtml>
by Anne Barnard, Boston Globe
May 24, 2001
A year and two weeks after nurses won limits on forced overtime in the St. Vincent Hospital strike, Brockton Hospital could become the next battle zone for the national crisis in health care staffing.
Unless today's negotiations yield a breakthrough, nurses there will go on strike tomorrow, citing a reason that sounds novel - and infuriates hospital executives who say the union is fomenting a strike to push its legislative agenda.
It's not over wages, say union leaders, even though the two sides disagree on salary increases. It's not exactly over forced overtime, since the hospital has already backed off its initial objections and agreed to limit forced overtime to four hours at a time, eight times a year.
Rather, union leaders say, it's about the hospital's failure to promise - in contract language, subject to the grievance process - to hire enough nurses to avoid relying on overtime in the first place.
It's an unusual situation: The nurses are trying to use a labor dispute to force through a solution to the understaffing of nurses, a nationwide problem that, analysts say, underlies public health problems from medical errors to emergency-room shutdowns. They are throwing down a gauntlet, trying to pin the accountability squarely on hospitals.
But the hospitals won't go quietly. Brockton executives fume that they are being unfairly made to symbolize a system-wide problem. And the American Hospital Association insists its members can't bear the burden alone when they are being squeezed by inadequate Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.
It's an argument being played out across the country, following a year in which nurses have vaulted their issues to the top of national and state legislative agendas and emerged as public, and popular, faces of the health care crisis.
In a chicken-and-egg debate, hospitals say they cannot hire more nurses because of a nationwide shortage; while nurses' groups say 500,000 nurses who don't work at the bedside have been driven away by grueling work conditions due to the lack of staff.
California hospitals are scrambling to implement the nation's first law requiring hospitals to maintain certain nurse-patient ratios. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents nurses at Brockton and 80 other hospitals across the state, is pushing a similar law on Beacon Hill, with the Massachusetts Hospital Association bitterly opposing it.
Fourteen states last year introduced legislation limiting mandatory overtime; Maine and New Jersey passed such laws, according to the American Nurses Association.
And as Brockton negotiates, nurses in Youngstown, Ohio, and across British Columbia are on strike, partly over mandatory overtime. In Minnesota, 8,000 nurses may strike at the end of the month.
Brockton is notable in that even after winning concessions from the hospital on mandatory overtime, the union is continuing to push for a broader commitment to higher levels of staffing.
''[Brockton nurses] are saying, `We're going to insist through the contract on an appropriate level of staffing, and it's management's problem to figure out how to get the resources to deal with it,''' said Jack Needleman, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. He wrote one of several studies released this year that showed patients do worse when there are fewer nurses tending them.
That approach, he said, doesn't take into account the hospital's problems, highlighted in a draft state report obtained by the Globe this week, that suggest a $200 million shortfall in Medicaid funding.
Brockton vice president Robert Hughes had a blunter interpretation. ''They want a strike,'' he said, in order to push through their mandatory staffing bill.
''It's really about money, but they don't want to be seen as striking over that,'' he added.
Massachusetts Nurse Association spokesman David Schildmeier said that was an insult to Brockton's nurses. Without the contract language the union is pushing for, he said, the hospital can continue to rely on nurses' volunteerism to save money on hiring permanent staff.
There were 79 mandatory overtime shifts worked from November though January, he said. According to the hospital, there were 9,600 hours of mandatory overtime in the last six months, or around 3 percent of all hours worked. The language the union wants would rob the hospital of the autonomy it needs to respond to changing situations, Hughes said.
The American Nurses Association takes a middle-ground approach. It opposes mandatory staffing ratios. But, said Rose Gonzalez, director of Government Affairs, the group is urging Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry to propose new Medicaid funds that require hospitals to increase nurse staffing.
''You can give the hospitals as much money as they ask for and unless there's some accountability ... we won't see it go to nursing,'' she said.
Needleman also opposes mandated staffing ratios, but instead suggested requiring hospitals to publicly disclose whether they are meeting their own staffing standards and to monitor patient outcomes and how they are affected by staffing.
Tim Gens, senior vice president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, said the state's hospitals have increased nurse positions by 5.6 percent since 1996, but that 8 to 10 percent are unfilled - up to 25 percent at some hospitals.
As if to drive home the point, three hospitals - Newton-Wellesley, the Cambridge Health Alliance, and Brockton's rival Good Samaritan - showed up at union headquarters yesterday to recruit nurses. A strike would provide them with much-needed temporary labor.
This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 5/24/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
Wanted: Good pay for quite a few good nurses
by Laura Billings
May 22, 2001
Local 30-73 of the American Federation of Musicians and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Society just voted to ratify a contract that would adjust a beginning violinist's base pay to about $62,700 next season.
Over at Northwest Airlines, the mechanics, cleaners and custodians ratified an hourly pay rate that would give full-time inspectors about $61,000 a year.
And now the Minnesota Nurses Association is asking to raise the base pay for full-time nurses to about $50,000 a year.
There may be overpaid cellists and incompetent airline mechanics in the world, but you don't hear the public weighing in on their labor disputes with the same air of authority as I've heard since Minnesota's 7,700 nurses voted to reject a contract offer that would have increased their pay by 18 percent over the next three years.
Since we all count ourselves as health care consumers -- as opposed to frequent fliers or SPCO subscribers -- we must consider ourselves to be experts on the subject. Typical of this notion is the caller who griped to my voice mail: "In most jobs, that would be a dream bonus. Nurses don't even know how good they've got it.''
You can say that only if you know nothing about nursing. So let's review the job description: Wanted: A compassionate and highly skilled caregiver willing to work evenings, weekends and major holidays, solving stressful problems (i.e., life or death) in highly collaborative environment, risking repeated exposure to everything from hepatitis to HIV, and working with a patient population sicker than ever before. Heavy lifting, constant hand-holding and occasional housekeeping (blood, urine, etc.) required. Since 92 percent of nurses are women, applicant must accept prevailing gender bias suggesting you should find your job emotionally rather than financially rewarding. Though as many as 20 percent of nursing jobs are unfilled, due to nurse shortages and a high burn-out rate, applicant must be willing to work for wages that haven't gone up since 1992. Skill with depressed, despairing patients and grieving, heartbroken families a plus.
It is a forbidding job and yet there are more men and women in nursing than ever before.
"The work is emotionally rewarding and you know you're making a difference,'' says Jan Rabbers, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Nurses Association. "We have a survey of our members that says that 70 percent of nurses love their profession, but less than 20 percent of them had any confidence they would get quality care in their declining years.''
Nurses have good reason to be concerned, since they've seen the first symptoms of these headache-inducing trends: By 2010 this country will need 1.4 million nurses but will have only 656,000. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of nurses were younger than 35; now the average nurse is 47 years old and rising, and will be ready for retirement just as the baby boomers stop taking their health for granted.
The pressures that come with short staffing, longer shifts and more demanding patients is leading to a serious burn-out rate: A study of Pennsylvania nurses found that 41 percent were dissatisfied with their jobs, and 22 percent wanted to quit within the year. And just last month, President Bush proposed cutting spending for medical education by 60 percent.
Nurses don't know how good they've got it? If we don't do something to attract more nurses and keep them in their jobs -- offering the same financial consideration we give to violinists and airline mechanics -- we patients won't remember how good we once had it.
Good nurses are like good health -- you really don't miss them until they're gone.
Laura Billings can be reached at lbillings@pioneerpress.com or (651) 228-5584.
© 2001 PioneerPlanet / St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press / TwinCities.com- All Rights Reserved
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Strike Headquarters
Medical Care Employee Federal Credit Union
630 Gypsy Lane, Suite 1
Youngstown, Ohio 44505
Next door to Northside Hospital
Phone: 330-746-6344 or 330-716-2196
Fax: 330-746-6351
Office open 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., 7 days a week
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House approves bill fining hospitals for too few nurses
SALEM -- The House on Wednesday approved a proposal to penalize hospitals with inadequate numbers of nurses on duty. House Bill 2800, which also would prohibit hospitals from requiring nurses to work overtime, passed 42-17 and goes to the Senate. Nurses say the bill would allow them to spend more time with patients and to be less likely to make mistakes because they are tired. The improved working conditions would attract more people to the profession and help counter the current shortage of nurses, they say. Nurses say they are working longer shifts but still don't have time to provide adequate care. Nurses who make mistakes face penalties or loss of their licenses. Hospitals should face similar penalties, supporters said. But some lawmakers who voted against the bill said state administrative rules already require hospitals to develop and adhere to plans that ensure enough nurses will be on duty. Some said the proposal would unduly burden rural hospitals, which already have a hard time finding enough nurses, with fines as high as $5,000 a day for failing to comply with staffing levels. The overtime issue is a collective bargaining matter that should be negotiated by hospitals and unions, said Ed Patterson, a lobbyist for the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, which opposes the bill. -- Steve Mayes
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