Letter from the Council of Presidents
Spring is definitely here.
All across our great organization, in every state, every facility, every department, we feel an energetic buzz of activity as nurses tackle new and old
projects with renewed vigor and determination. As we report in this issue, NNU nurses are sponsoring a host of bills and initiatives this year, from the reintroduction of our federal Robin Hood tax on Wall Street, to a safe ratios bill in Washington, D.C., to a safe lift bill in Missouri, to a bill in California to hold nonprofit hospitals more accountable for how much charity care they provide. Meanwhile, we are still fighting the good fight, as the nurses of Quincy Medical Center in Massachusetts did on April 11 when they went on strike for patient safety and a fair contract. And we're scoring wins! Nurses from Chicago to Florida are closing first contracts, and nurses in California are settling some long-outstanding agreements, too.
In this edition of the magazine, we also tackle the complicated and thorny issue of how nurses use Facebook. Because
hospital policies and laws are changing so rapidly in response to these kinds of social media networks, we don't purport to give nurses any definitive advice about what is acceptable or not acceptable to post. But we decided that since so many nurses and members are already using Facebook and there's no indication that this will stop any time soon, we might as well cover what kinds of Facebook activities by workers are protected under the National Labor Relations Act.
