National Nurses United

"Of all the unions I've been talking to, nobody has a better global vision than the nurses." can just look at Ireland: It isn't working!" said Claire Mahon, RN and president of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organization, of her country, which has enacted round after round of drastic cuts to its social programs. Mahon described how her country's health system has lost about 5,000 registered nurses since a moratorium on staffing took effect in 2007, and about 2,000 of those were lost since just February 2012. As a result, patients are languishing on gurneys (they call them trolleys) in emergency rooms and hallways, so much so that her organization started counting them and publishing the numbers for the public and media to see. Even in countries that were not hit very hard by the banking crisis and recession, such as Australia, Canada, Israel, or Brazil, governments have used the global unrest to call for austerity and defund their national healthcare programs. This depletion of resources sets up the system for what many of the delegates see as the ultimate goal of austerity: privatization of the system for corporate profit. When public health systems lack resources, they don't function well, and the government then uses those problems as an entrée to suggest privatization of services. In all those countries, nurses have been instrumental in beating back attempt after attempt to privatize hospitals, clinics, and other sectors of the health system. "They talk about austerity, but what they're really trying to do is privatize, get rid of our independent umpires [arbitrators], get rid of all kinds of standards and ratios, whether it's for nurses and patients or teachers and pupils," said Judith Kiedja, RN and assistant general secretary of the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association in Australia. New South Wales RNs won ratios in their collective bargaining agreement with the government in 2011, but have struggled to enforce them and with the election of a new state government in March 2012, find their hard-won ratios under attack. The situation is the same in the Australian state of Victoria, the other state to have minimum RN-to-patient ratios, said representatives from the Australian Nursing Federation. 14 N AT I O N A L N U R S E Nurses' shared struggles across the world led the international delegates to form a new organization called Global Nurses United to coordinate our countries' work on these issues (see sidebar). In addition to these large group talks, nurses also attended a wide range of continuing education courses on topics from climate change to the Robin Hood tax movement to what the Affordable Care Act means for nursing practice. It was an action-packed three days of learning, activism, networking, and fun. Perhaps California Gov. Jerry Brown summed it up best when he declared during his address to the assembly, "Of all the unions I've been talking to, nobody has a better global vision than the nurses. If you can link your immediate occupational objectives with the larger sense of what we need to do as human beings, you become a very powerful organization." 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 JUNE 2013

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