National Nurses United

By Lucia Hwang W hen julie laslett first learned that her son, Alex, was trying to help organize a union at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where they both work as registered nurses, her first honest-to-god reaction was anger. "I was like, 'Are you crazy? What are you doing?'" said Laslett, 58, who works in the outpatient department of thoracic surgery. "I was really mad at him because I was afraid of what would happen if he lost his job. His wife is in school, and they would have no way of sup- porting themselves and then I would have to support them!" Once the Johns Hopkins nurses' organizing campaign went pub- lic in spring 2018, however, Alex Laslett invited his mom to attend a union meeting. She remembers the microphone being passed around the room so that nurses could introduce themselves. All the nurses who worked in intensive care unit departments, like her son who works in the surgical ICU, stated their names, how many years they had logged at Hopkins, and that they would simply like to take a lunch break. Julie Laslett immediately felt shock and anger, but this time it was directed at her employer. Having worked at Hopkins in some capacity for more than 30 years, she had heard her fair share of sto- ries over the decades about her fellow nurses receiving poor treat- ment, unfair blows to their careers, and being exploited by Hopkins. Even her own sister, who also used to work at Hopkins, complained about never getting lunch and being worked to death. But she had not realized how widespread and systemic the injustice had been. In her positions, she had always been able to take breaks. And now her son was being abused, too. "I'm like, O-M-G. How pervasive is this? It's all over the hospital," said Julie Laslett. "And you're taking care of sick-as-dog patients, and you don't get a lunch break?" That meeting opened her eyes as to why the registered nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital, considered one of the United States' most prestigious medical centers, desperately need a union. Nurses at Johns Hopkins are determined to unionize the institution, which employs an impressive 3,200 RNs, saying that they are simply try- ing to help Johns Hopkins deliver the world-class standard of nurs- ing and patient care that it claims to provide and upon which the institution was founded. Though many nurses will say that they were attracted to jobs at Johns Hopkins because they wanted to work with "the best of the best" and agree that the physician and RN staff are top notch, the reality of working at Johns Hopkins falls far short of its reputation. Nurses throughout the medical center have documented numerous problems, such as severe, systemic short staffing; an exodus of experienced nurses so that sometimes an RN with only two years of nursing under her belt will be the most senior nurse on the floor; wage theft by Johns Hopkins when it refuses to compensate nurses for standard overtime and other differential pay; scheduling nightmares due to rotating day and night shifts; and truly disturbing shortages of routine and basic equipment, supplies, and personal protective gear. Nurses in December held a town hall meeting to release three reports that show the ways in which Johns Hopkins is not fulfilling its mission as a world-class, nonprofit medical institution. The first calculated how Johns Hopkins actually receives millions more in public funds than it spends on providing charity care to the resi- dents and impoverished neighborhoods of Baltimore (more than $3 million in 2017 alone). The second documented nurses' serious patient care concerns and dove into more detail about the problems described earlier. The third revealed the results of a survey of nurses' health and safety on the job, concluding that 37 percent of Johns Hopkins nurses had experienced workplace violence in the past year and that almost all the nurses felt at risk of injury at work. Predictably, Johns Hopkins has aggressively tried to bust the nurses' efforts to form a union. The National Labor Relations Board, which under this current administration is no friend of unions, still three times found merit to allegations by the Johns Hopkins nurses that the hospital was violating their rights to form a union by sur- veilling them and preventing them from discussing the union in 18 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G O C T O B E R | N O V E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 B U I L D I N G Mother and son RNs Julie and Alex Laslett are unionizing Joh

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