As nurse activists,
it's natural to care most about and be most involved with solving
problems at a facility or local level. After all, these are the issues that
we encounter and must struggle with daily in our work, or involve
people we personally know and can influence.
But the Covid pandemic taught Deborah Burger, RN and
National Nurses United (NNU) president, a critical lesson: The fed-
eral government wields tremendous power over nurses' health and
safety at work and the safety of patients, and has the ability to set,
raise, and enforce standards for the entire country, all at one go. The
most tangible example of the importance of federal government
action, or sometimes inaction, during Covid was the lack of, until
June 2021, enforceable federal Occupational Health and Safety
Administration (OSHA) standards for what employers must do to
protect workers from infectious diseases such as Covid-19. Nurses are
well aware that because there were no national rules, their hospital
employers across the country could, at their whim, cut major corners
on protecting them at work, forcing them to wear ineffectual droplet
masks or to reuse single-use-only N95 respirators (when nurses
could get them), denying them testing, failing to notify employees
about exposures or contact trace positive cases, and the list goes on.
From the beginning of the pandemic, NNU began lobbying for
OSHA to adopt a national emergency temporary standard so that
employers would be obligated to provide nurses, health care, and
other workers the protections they needed. We were finally success-
ful in June 2021 when the Biden Administration issued an
emergency temporary standard, but Burger said that, in retrospect
and moving forward, it is obvious NNU needs to strengthen and
expand its influence at the national political level by supporting and
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Leaders of the
How NNU nurses pool and flex their power
