Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/797766
"It's nice to see all the power in this room," said Zenei Cortez, RN and California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee copresident. She was just one of the many CNA/NNOC chief nurse representa- tives greeting a historic gathering on March 1 of more than 250 counterparts from around the country, including participants from the Minnesota Nurses Association and the New York State Nurses Association. These nurses embody the best of the best RN activists in the entire nation: leaders elected by their peers to be the union's top advocate at each facility. The combined experience, organizing savvy, and chutzpah in one room was extraordinary and inspiring. At this tenuous time for workers' rights, healthcare, and patient safety regulations, they assembled to swap stories, learn from one another and NNU staff about the political context for attacks on labor and our social movement for justice, and strategize about how to build the strongest and most organized cadre of registered nurses possible in order to advocate and protect themselves, their patients, their communities, and larger society. "We're all leaders in our facilities," said Malinda Markowitz, RN and also a copresident of CNA/NNOC. "We agitate. We organ- ize. We fight all the time. But we need to go deeper. People are looking to us." The very first issue nurses tackled was the question of how to preserve and grow the union if and when Congress succeeds in pass- ing so-called federal "right to work" legislation. Such laws destroy the unity among a workforce and starve the union of financial resources by allowing employees to avoid paying union dues even though the union represents them in dealings with management. Some 28 states already have "right to work" laws and others are gearing up to pass them. The ultimate goal is to break unions. Another very real threat to nurse unionization would be a Supreme Court decision to recategorize all RNs as "supervisors" just because they may sometimes take on charge nurse duties or coordi- nate the work of lesser-skilled clinical staff. The nurses took some time to imagine what their lives would be like if their workplaces were not unionized. RNs expressed deep con- cerns about how their voices would be silenced without a union. Cor- porate healthcare could easily implement its agenda to further maximize profit at the potential expense of quality patient care. Many nurses chimed in about what would happen if nurses were basically silenced and stripped of protections that the union offers for advocating for themselves, their nursing practice, and their patients. Not only could management lower pay and benefit stan- dards for RNs with no union, but patient care and safety regulations could be seriously compromised. Safe staffing standards, including RN-to-patient ratios, could be at risk. Cynthia Martinez, a newborn nursery and labor and delivery RN from Corpus Christi Medical Center in Texas, explained how her unit is routinely short staffed, but that because of their contract, she feels pro- tected in speaking up to ask for nurses to be added. Recently, her hospi- tal has started to discipline nurses for "being negative" or, in other words, having any criticisms of working conditions. "I got into it with my man- ager," said Martinez. "I said, 'Being a patient advocate is not negative!'" Right to work "scares the hell out of me," said John De La Cerda, 14 N A T 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 J A N U A R Y | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 7 Follow the Leader At historic gathering of all chief nurse reps, RNs vow to fight on, and learn how to prepare for battle. STAFF REPORT