National Nurses United

She worked nights, and Richard worked days so that someone was always home with the kids. Though her facility was unionized, she remembered that she never saw a contract, never saw a labor rep, never received any information about the union, how to participate, or about her rights under the union contract. Starting in the late 1970s, McVay observed that Kaiser started to change for the worse, restructuring in a way that mirrored many hospital facilities under the advent of health maintenance organiza- tions (HMOs). In misguided attempts to increase efficiency and cut costs, Kaiser experimented with different nursing models to elimi- nate the need for as many registered nurses at the bedside by having them supervise lesser-qualified or completely unlicensed staff. McVay, always the patient advocate, started questioning and chal- lenging these changes. She once had a scheduling problem and called her union, the California Nurses Association, to ask for help handling it, but the person there told her to take her issue to the union arm of the organization and that she herself would not help because McVay "wouldn't understand anything." Before the early 1990s, the CNA board of directors and administration were dominated by nursing managers and educators who considered themselves nursing's elite—the ladies' auxiliary types—and wanted nothing to do with unions or anyone who would challenge hospital management to fight for the rights of nurses who were working at the bedside. All union business was shunted off onto the economic and general welfare (EGW) division of CNA, an under-resourced and ignored branch of the larger organization. "For the group that was in charge at that time, anybody that stayed at a bedside couldn't be very smart because they're handling patients," said McVay. After being rebuffed, McVay linked up with other CNA bedside nurses who were interested in reforming the organization to better represent the interests of nurses who were actually providing hands-on patient care. With her children now older and preparing to leave home for college, she had time to start attending bargaining meetings and board leadership meetings. The activist nurses formed groups and even won a single seat on the CNA board, but were unable to change much. In the early 1990s, CNA unknowingly sealed its own fate when it hired a smart and dedicated labor organiz- er, RoseAnn DeMoro, to be in charge of the economic and general welfare division. A champion of workers, DeMoro actually wanted to help nurses build a strong union and challenge corporate America in order to bet- ter take care of their patients. "The first time I met RoseAnn, I was so happy because I finally met someone at CNA who understood labor and what unions are about," said McVay. "To understand labor means to understand what the problems are, what needs to be done to recognize the working person, to support the working person, to be able to express themselves and to protect themselves." But DeMoro's bosses did not approve of her at all. After DeMoro took the Summit nurses out on strike in 1992 and the Kaiser nurses were agitating for more money and resources to combat the restructuring of their practice, the nurse managers on Dec. 20, 1992 fired DeMoro and her staff and removed McVay and other activist RNs from the EGW commission. What followed soon after is now known at CNA as "the staff nurse revolution." McVay and other RN activists, as well as DeMoro and the fired staff, worked around the clock for the next few months to stage, essentially, a coup of the CNA board of directors. They campaigned hard and were successful in helping staff nurse candidates win the majority of board seats. These bedside nurses took back their organ- ization, promptly firing all the old staff and hiring DeMoro as their new executive director. Everybody quickly got busy with the hard but necessary work of building the union, educating and organizing nurses, organizing more facilities, making new hires, and overhaul- ing the organization. In those years following the revolution, McVay really came into her own. She always described herself as a person who, up until that time, never had a problem standing up for another person or advo- cating for a patient, but had trouble speaking up for herself. She once threatened to call the news station about Kaiser's refusal to 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 21

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