United We Stand
Only two months old, the largest RN organization in United States
history is already changing the face of nursing. By Felicia Mello
I
t may have taken more than a century for direct-care
nurses to form their own national union. But the
150,000-member National Nurses United is wasting no
time getting to work on an ambitious patient-advocacy
agenda.
NNU "will transform the face of healthcare and nursing, rattle the windows in all those fancy hospital corporate boardrooms, and shake the halls of Congress and
our state legislatures," NNU co-president Deborah Burger, RN, told nurses gathered in Phoenix in December for the organization's founding convention.
In the months since the convention, National Nurses United—
formed by combining the California Nurses Association/National
Nurses Organizing Committee, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and United American Nurses—has won its first organizing cam-
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N AT I O N A L N U R S E
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
JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2010
