National Nurses United

even buy its nurses gloves that don't rip? Cheap gloves are just one of the many reasons my colleagues and I have been fighting for more than a year to unionize with National Nurses Organizing Committee. How many of you come to work to find you are running from patient to patient and you just don't have enough time or hands to do all you need to do to care for your patients? That kind of short staffing is a chronic problem at Johns Hopkins. Cheap gloves are just one symptom of the many ills we nurses have identified with Johns Hopkins. It's just one of the many rea- sons my colleagues and I have been fighting for more than a year to unionize with National Nurses Organizing Committee. I know the power of the nurses when we stand together and I grew up bearing witness to the power of a union. My mom worked at a unionized mental health hospital. I remember she used to say whenever she had issues, she would go to the union and her issues were resolved quickly. In California, I worked as a travel nurse at a union hospital, and their pay was better, and when I talked to the hospital nurses it seemed their benefits were better. Because the hospital was in Cali- fornia, there were mandated staffing ratios—thanks to a long fight by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United. Mandated staffing ratios mean better patient care. When we started organizing, our manager was very upset. He said the union wasn't welcome at the hospital. Johns Hopkins is now spending millions of dollars on anti-union consultants and forcing nurses to go to mandatory meetings where they are fed an anti- union message. Organizing at Johns Hopkins is hard. But when the union is voted in it will make a great difference at the hospital. It will allow nurses to have a seat at the table and get what they need to care for themselves and their patients. Tony Fitzpatrick, RN, industrial relations director of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) I want to tell you about Mary. Mary is a nurse with 20 years of expe- rience who works on a medical ward in a large Dublin hospital. She is married with two teenage children. During the recession, Mary's husband, who works in construction, lost his job and she became the sole earner for the family. In 2017, Mary and her fellow nurses and midwives had accepted a new wage agreement covering public sector workers on the big condi- tion that a special commission would examine particular areas where recruitment and retention was a problem. Nursing and midwifery was one of the first sectors identified for this and everyone expected that the issues of low pay and short staffing would be considered. Imagine Mary's shock when the government completely betrayed its agreement. For Mary and her fellow nurses and mid- wives, the time had come. The time had come where they would tolerate no more. The time had come to stand up for their patients, themselves, and their families. The time had come to call their employer's bluff and force them to recognize the incredible worth and value of the nurses and midwives. The time had come…TO STRIKE! The date of the first one-day strike is set: Jan. 30, 2019. This would be only the second time in INMO's 100-year history that its members have gone on strike. Two more one-day strikes follow, on Feb. 5 and Feb. 9. On Feb. 9, the union also called for a massive nurses' march on Dublin. Mary will never forget the sight of thou- sands upon thousands of nurses and midwives, their coworkers, their family, their friends, their neighbors, their communities, flood- ing in by bus, train, car, foot, to converge on the capital city in support of them. 45,000 people in all. No sooner had the march concluded than INMO leaders were invited to sit down for negotiations. Ultimately, these talks led to two Labor Court recommendations that addressed everything Mary and her colleagues had wanted. The nurses and midwives had won. Mary told me to tell you, "Remember! NO PRESSURE, NO PROGRESS!" Luis Antulio Alpirez Guzmán, secretary general, Sindicato Nacional de los Trabajadores de Salud de Guatemala (SNTSG) Our union is national and includes nurses, technical, medical and operational health care workers in the public health sector. Daily we face the challenge of seeing our patients cry because they don't have the money to buy the prescriptions they've received, or from seeing their family members ill—all of them depending on receiv- ing health care through the public sector, because private services are only located in the urban areas. It's this that motivates our more than 35,000 members to protest and fight against a system that refuses to give the public health sector adequate resources. Accord- ing to our laws the state is obligated to provide quality health care as a human right but it does not comply with these laws. The reality is as labor activists, we are in a constant state of resist- ance because the Guatemalan government wants to eliminate the labor movement; they want to get rid of the trade unions especially our SNTSG union which is the largest in the health sector. In the decade of the 1980s, more than 45,000 leaders of the social move- ment disappeared, most of them were leaders of the trade union movement. From 1996 to date in Guatemala, they have murdered more than 90 union leaders. According to statistics from the Interna- tional Workers Organization ILO, Guatemala is the most dangerous country to be a trade union leader or organizer in the world. Earlier this year they attacked our union directly. Our compañera, Dora Regina, deputy secretary of SNTSG, and I were detained and imprisoned in the most dangerous prison in Guatemala. They imprisoned us because we were on the collective bargaining commit- tee of the last agreement negotiated in 2013. After staying 12 days and 11 nights in prison, we were released on bail but the court case is still pending. We hope that with the support of national and interna- tional solidarity, we will be acquitted. We have no financial resources to pay the expenses our defense entails. However, we are putting everything we can into this because if we win our acquittal, it will be an important victory for collective bargaining and freedom of associ- ation, in Guatemala and the world. J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 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 N A T I O N A L N U R S E 25 Shaneisha McMillan, RN Tony Fitzpatrick, RN

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