National Nurses United

A P R I L | M AY 2 0 1 4 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 N A T I O N A L N U R S E 7 When we last left Kay McVay, longtime intensive care unit RN at Kaiser Permanente and president emeritus of the California Nurses Association, she had just met RoseAnn DeMoro, a new hire by old guard CNA leadership to head the collective bargaining division. Unlike her bosses, DeMoro was actually interested in advocat- ing for and organizing nurses to fight employers' bad workplace practices. So what kinds of things did RoseAnn do differently? Well, one major thing that upset the old girls' club was she helped the Summit Medical Center nurses go out on strike over the right to strike in support of our fellow coworkers. That's critical, to be able to have that solidarity in the workplace and to be able to back it up with action. That's number one. The second thing was she supported and hired people who supported us Kaiser nurses. What was happening with Kaiser? It was the early 90s, and Kaiser proposed a restructuring plan called the "Patient Protection" initiative. Basically, they wanted to lay off RNs and have more unlicensed assistive personnel. So it wouldn't necessarily be an RN who's caring for you. Like what we're fighting now. I remember I went through the pamphlet describing this initiative, page by page, line by line with a ruler, just looking for two letters: R-N. There was not one sentence that had the letters R-N in it. I remember getting very angry. The lack of respect and understanding for what nurses do was just so infuriating. So how did you fight this? We started to organize. We got buttons to wear and even that was a struggle. Another staff person and I must have gone to every single Kaiser in Northern and Central California to talk to the nurses about what this "Patient Protection" plan meant. We held some classes to educate staff nurses about this initiative. And we started putting pressure on the old girls who controlled all the money to support what we were doing. But they would never give it to us. They viewed it as frivolous. They said no. So the Ladies Auxiliary really chose wrong when they thought they were picking RoseAnn to keep the staff nurses quiet? Yes, they didn't have any idea at first. But when CNA realized what was happen- ing, they fired RoseAnn and 12 others on the staff. And many of us nurses who had seats on the board of the collective bargain- ing arm of CNA were suspended. I'll always remember the day. It was Dec. 20, 1992. Wow. So what happened next? Well, we staff nurses had no choice but to fight. Our plan was to run our staff nurse candidates in the 1993 CNA Board of Direc- tors election and win control of the board. We had some key people and allies helping us, giving us legal help and letting us use their offices, phones, copiers, that sort of thing. We worked around the clock. We had a hotline that we created so that nurses could call and ask any question that they wanted. So what was the outcome? I remember when they counted the votes, at first they told us we lost. Then they came back and said there had been a mistake, and that we had won. I was just jumping up and down. It was wonderful. Then we all got together and looked at one another and thought, "What do we do now?" And one of our advisers said the first step was to "clean house," so that's what we did. We fired the Ladies Auxiliary and hired RoseAnn to be the executive director. After everything settled down and the smoke cleared, we ended up with 2,000-plus RNs. And Kaiser backed off the "Patient Protection" thing. So then we were finally ready to really get to work. Check back next issue to learn what the staff nurses did to build the new California Nurses Association into the force it is today. See the Jan-Feb 2014 issue for the first installment of this series. latest filings show $21.68 billion in "TNE Excess." To quantify the value of $21.7 billion, the advocates noted the amount: • Is larger than the GDP of 88 nations, per the UN 2012–including Afghanistan, Honduras, and Iceland. • Equals $2,400 for each of Kaiser's 9 million members; $3,000 for each of Kaiser's 7.2 million members in California; or $571 for each of the 38 million residents of California • Dwarfs Gov. Jerry Brown's 2014-15 proposed budget cut of $500 million for public health, and the entire state's annual $3.5 billion public health department budget. "I was absolutely shocked. I can't even get my head around how much money that is," said Cassie Morales, a cardiac monitor- ing unit RN at Kaiser Walnut Creek and a Kaiser quality liaison. "With that much money that they're just sitting on, you wouldn't know it by the way the facility is ran. We're constantly low on resources, low on staff. It amazes me that there's that much money available that they could put back into the hospital." —Staff report Conversations with Kay

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