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8 » RNs in Motion More Than 120 Years of RN Power OUR HISTORY OUR HISTORY — A TIMELINE 1903 California Nurses Association (CNA) founded: one of the first professional RN organizations in the United States. 1905 CNA-sponsored legislation results in the first RN licensure. 1913 California becomes first state to include unpaid student nurses in laws and to limit workday to eight hours for women's labor. 1935 Social Security Act adopted — nurses termed independent contractors and not covered until 1952. 1938 CNA adopts platform for the eight-hour workday. 1945 CNA first in the nation to represent nurses in collective- bargaining agreements, negotiating contracts at five San Francisco Bay Area hospitals establishing the 40-hour workweek, vacation, sick leave, health benefits, shift differentials, and 15 percent salary increase. 1966 2,000 CNA RNs stage mass-resignation protest and win major gains: 40 percent pay increase, eight paid holidays, and time and a half for holidays worked. 1969 CNA stages first strikes ever by a nurses association in United States history when RNs from eight San Francisco Bay Area hospitals walk out. The strikes led to establishment of Professional Practice Committees (PPC) and paid educational leave in CNA contracts. 1971 CNA contract language requires hospital-staffing systems based on patient acuity and nursing care, with staff RNs participating in staffing assessments. 1974 Major strike by 4,400 RNs for 21 days, affecting 42 Northern California clinics and hospitals. RNs win: every other weekend off, hospital must share staffing and patient- classification information with CNA, and RNs must be trained for specialty areas. 1976 CNA-sponsored regulation establishes mandated RN-to- patient ratios in intensive care units in all California hospitals. 1983 University of California medical center RNs vote to join CNA in an election covering 4,420 RNs — one of the single biggest organizing election victories ever for RNs. 1992 Staff RNs organize massive resistance and CNA takes successful legal action in getting Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California, to rescind a work redesign program that would have displaced RNs with unlicensed assistive personnel. 1993 Staff RN majority elected to CNA Board of Directors for the first time in CNA history on a platform promoting patient advocacy and challenging unsafe hospital restructuring. CNA introduces first ratio legislation for all acute-care units, A.B. 1445. Throughout the last 120 years, California Nurses Association has been on the historical and clinical cutting edge of confronting a political economy that values profits over people. Our advocacy expanded nation- ally with the creation of National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC). The delivery of health care in the United States has undergone dramatic changes in the span of the past 120 years. RNs today must chal- lenge the money-driven structure of the health care system and, through our collective action, advance the role of nurses as patient advocates at the patient's bedside and beyond. The pivotal change in our organization came in 1993, the year that direct-care RNs took charge of the organization and for the first time elected a staff nurse majority on the Board of Directors. The organiza- tion adopted a platform based on patient advocacy, which has been a guiding principle ever since and has allowed us to build alliances with patients and consumers promoting Medicare for All based on a single-payer model.