Nurses march to support unions

By Stephen Franklin
Chicago Tribune
August 8, 2006

Along with a bunch of fellow nurses, Carol Koelly plopped down around noon Tuesday in the middle of a busy downtown street, joined her union colleagues in loud chants, and then waited to be carted off by police.

"We are standing up for our patients," shouted Koelly, of San Bernardino, Calif., who came to Chicago to participate in the rally by unionized nurses and other union members outside the offices of the American Hospital Association.

They were protesting the association's stance on a case before the National Labor Relations Board that unions fear could markedly trim back their already diminished rank and file. If the labor board broadens the definition of who is a supervisor, union officials say that as many as 8 million workers in industries across the board could be barred from labor organizations.

The demonstrators had planned to rally inside the office building where the Hospital Association is housed. But on arrival, they found it closed and moved their protest to Franklin just north of Madison in front the building.

They expected to be arrested, and patiently waited and waited for a half hour while police maintained a watchful eye on them and diverted traffic elsewhere.

Once it was clear the police were not in a hurry to arrest them, the nurses and several hundred other union members and supporters who were cheering them on, quietly marched off.

"We made our point," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, the parent organization for the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which represents Cook County's nurses.

DeMoro, whose organization had arranged the rally, vowed to hold similar demonstrations across the U.S. "We are going to escalate," she declared.

The nurses are especially concerned because two of the NLRB cases involve attempts to consider registered nurses as charge nurses. That is where the American Hospital Association, the umbrella group for the nation's hospitals, comes in.

It has urged the NLRB to consider some, but not all charge nurses as supervisors, said AHA spokeswoman Alicia Mitchell. "It is up to the NLRB to decide which charge nurses are supervisors," she added.

A legal filing with the NLRB on behalf of the AHA and other healthcare industry groups in 2003 was less precise. It warned that if charge nurses are not considered as supervisors, then patient care will suffer, and the nursing shortage will worsen.

But Deborah Burger, the president of the California Nurses Association, who was on hand for Tuesday's rally, saw a different problem for nurses if unions lose the NLRB cases.

"By the oaths that we take, we can't advocate for corporations and put our patients on a back seat," she said.

Similarly, Sue Cannon, a nurse from Irvine, Calif., is convinced that hospitals are really using the NLRB cases as a way to weaken unions.

"It is union busting, and the corporations are scared to death of us," she said.