National Nurses United

corporatization of healthcare, of which displacing RNs, corroding their practice, and cutting patient protections was escalating, all with the complicit acceptance of CNA's governing elite. An apocryphal story RoseAnn likes to tell is of a labor representative she hired early in her tenure who, while working with nurses in a tough bargaining fight, sought to prepare them for a possible strike. "She got a letter of warning from CNA," says RoseAnn. "I told her, frame it and put it on your wall." Brogan remembers something else, the first time he heard RoseAnn speak to the nurses. "She spoke not just about our working conditions. She talked about healthcare. She was the first person I heard talk about healthcare in any cogent, human way. She saw the big picture." Seamlessly unifying improvements for staff nurses with the "big picture" of transformative social change is a hallmark of RoseAnn's stewardship, and the legacy she leaves upon retiring in early March after 32 remarkable years of piloting both CNA, its affiliated Nation- al Nurses Organizing Committee, and NNU. It began with a nurses' association that needed a rebirth and a new direction, a leader Forbes magazine, the voice of Wall Street, once branded, as "Florence Nightingale, meet Mother Jones." The woman whom Esquire magazine noted in a 2006 profile, is "inevitably described as shrewd, brilliant and fearless," who was also called "Mother Teresa with brass knuckles." Or as RoseAnn is described in short takes by those who worked with her for years: A "risk taker," says Deborah Burger, RN, NNU and CNA co-president; a "bulldog," says Martha Kuhl, RN, NNU secretary-treasurer; and "tenacious," says Bonnie Castillo, RN. But also as "generous, protective," says Jean Ross, RN, NNU co- president; "a soft heart," says Zenei Cortez, RN, CNA copresident; and "a brilliant mind, a fabulous strategist, a humanist," says Malin- da Markowitz, RN, CNA copresident. "She embodies everything I wish I could be," says Cokie Giles, RN, NNOC copresident. "She is resuscitating what unions should be all about," said leg- endary consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 2006. "You represent workers. You represent patients. You fight in the legislature. You march, you picket, you educate, and you grow." Within minutes of meeting RoseAnn, Nader said, you could tell, "she was clearly a compass, not a weather vane." To assess the astonishing achievements of RoseAnn, turn back the clock to what CNA, the American Nurses Association (ANA), and all state nurses associations were like before her. Founded in the late 19th century mainly to professionalize nurs- ing and institutionalize nursing education, the ANA also worked to inculcate nurses as handmaidens to doctors and hospital executives, pushing hierarchal career advancement over the interests of nurses who provided hands-on care. The ANA, and the state nurses associations it spawned, resisted unionization for nurses for decades and opposed mass actions to improve work- ing and patient care conditions and the living standards of RNs, until forced to by an increasingly restless membership. Like its national counterparts, nurse managers and educators ran CNA, shut- ting out staff nurses, who comprised 90 percent of its membership and financed it, from all governance structures of the union. "They said we couldn't possibly know how to run the organization because we were just bedside nurses," the late Kay McVay, RN, a longtime staff nurse leader, recalled. "Through all those years before RoseAnn, we never had anybody who was there who would reach out and give a hand to us and pull us up. We'd get a foot maybe, but we wouldn't get a hand," said McVay. "She gave me the feeling that I was capable of doing things I was always afraid to try." "It was her insight. Her understanding of the role of the regis- tered nurse is totally amazing," says former CNA Nursing Practice Director Hedy Dumpel, RN. "She understood the power of the regis- tered nurse was not tapped. She tapped the power." RoseAnn, who in college worked on a dissertation about super- market cashiers titled "Checking Out Sexism," and had signs adorn- ing her office walls reading "Rebel Girl" and "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History," also homed in how nurses' historic low pay and poor retirement plans were directly linked to being a predomi- nantly female workforce. "What I love about what I do is we are building power for work- ing women and patients. I've had women come up to me and say, 'I've waited my whole life for this,'" she says. A working class, feminist, collective orientation, influenced by lead- ing a women's organization, characterize RoseAnn's achievements. Her work is augmented by a broad, strategic vision, experience as a stellar union leader and organizer, the most charismatic per- sonality many had ever seen, and an uncompromised devotion to empowering nurses, patients, and all workers, and driving social change. J A N U A R Y | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8 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 15

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