Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/447719
C A L I F O R N I A N U R S E D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 17 B efore her hospital suddenly told all its nurses in 1994 that it was doing away with time and a half for the last four hours of their 12-hour shifts, Sherri Stoddard didn't know much about CNA. "I thought I had a pretty good relationship with the administration, so I told the CFO guy at the time, 'If you do this, you need to increase the base rate,' because it was essentially a 14 percent pay cut," remembers Stoddard, a 19-year labor and delivery RN at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. "He came back and said this is non-negotiable. And we were like, You just bought yourself a union." Stoddard and a couple of motivated colleagues went union shopping, and soon figured out they should organize with the California Nurses Association. She didn't know it at the time, says Stoddard, but she was embarking on a decade-long journey of political education and activism that has included successfully organizing Sierra Vista and other Tenet hospitals, securing min- imum RN staffing ratios in California, and will now turn toward leading nurses to win universal, single-payer healthcare for Americans. Today, Stoddard sits on CNA's board of directors and serves as chief nurse rep for her facility. At Sierra Vista, Stoddard helped collect cards to show that the RNs wanted CNA to represent them. The RNs were halfway through before the hospital finally learned they were unioniz- ing. The RNs gained their bargaining unit in early 1996, but it would be months before all the hospital's challenges with the National Labor Relations Board were settled, and then another 14 months and three one-day strikes before the Sierra Vista RNs won their first contract in 1998. "It was so sweet," says Stoddard. "They gave us a 14 percent pay cut and told us we had no power to deal with it at all. I think they were flabber- gasted. Our attitude was, What did you think we were going to do, lay down and die?" A familiar inside joke among nurse leaders at CNA, Stoddard says she was eventually "cornered" into agreeing to Feature Story Hands-on Education Sherri Stoddard, RN didn't know much about CNA until she helped organize her own hospital BY LUCIA HWANG