Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/117874
NEWS BRIEFS Nurses at Sutter Tracy Vote in Union B CALIFORNIA y voting in march to join the California Nurses Association, nurses at Tracy Sutter Community Hospital enjoyed an extremely hard-fought organizing victory over Sutter Health, one of the biggest and wealthiest hospital chains in California. CNA now represents 6,200 RNs at 16 Sutter Health facilities. Most of those RNs are currently engaged in bitter contract negotiations with Sutter, during which the Sacramento-based corporation has demanded hundreds of concessions. In response, nurses have gone out on strike three times to defend their patients and standards. ���Nurses stood up for our patients and our profession, and we won,��� said Dotty Nygard, an emergency room RN. ���We can now share in the vision of a better and healthier future for our patients, our profession, and our community with CNA representation.��� The key issues that galvanized the RNs to 6 N AT I O N A L N U R S E organize centered on patient protection provisions that already exist in other CNArepresented Sutter hospitals. Some of the issues include making sure there are enough nurses dedicated to caring for patients while others are on much-needed breaks during their 12-hour shifts, as well as bonus pay for required certifications and enhanced sick leave. What the nurses accomplished wasn���t easy. Sutter Health, which bills itself as a notfor-profit company but amassed more than $4 billion in profits since 2007, launched an aggressive anti-union campaign of surveillance and harassment once it learned of the nurses��� plans to unionize. Nygard said she and other nurses attempted to defuse the tense situation so the RNs could exercise their democratic rights and communicate the case for a union during non-working hours. ���It���s not like we were performing some radical act, we were just attempting to join a union that more than 60,000 RNs already belong to in California.��� Nygard says she and seven other nurses attempted to meet with Sutter Tracy CEO 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 Dave Thompson. Thompson refused, walking out of his office. And while the hospital was busy abridging the nurses��� First Amendment rights, Thompson made sure he got the Sutter message across, publishing ���The Straight Talk,��� a newsletter which made the hospital���s case against unionization. ���The Straight Talk��� had its own dedicated space in the nurses��� break rooms. ���It was really a dark atmosphere,��� Nygard said. ���We didn���t feel safe posting on Facebook, on email, so 90 percent of our communication was over text messaging. We would call meetings over text, send encouraging notes; it was really our own text message revolution.��� All the hard work paid off. Nurses voted 83 to 70 to join CNA. After the election results were announced, nurses hugged one another and cried tears of joy. ���This is a dream come true. It���s been very oppressive since 2005 when Sutter came in to this hospital. Now with the union representing us there will be democracy and equality in our workplace,��� said Clarissa Concepcion, an RN who works in the medical surgical unit. ���Joe Rubin MARCH 2012