Rx for RNs: A new national union with a strong Minnesota presence

By Scott Carlson
Finance and Commerce
December 15, 2009

A new union representing some 150,000 frontline nurses across the nation held its founding convention last week in Phoenix, with three Minnesota women emerging among its top leaders.

Delegates to National Nurses United picked Jean Ross, a veteran registered nurse at Fairview Southdale hospital, as one of their labor groups three co-presidents. Meanwhile NNU's vice presidents include Linda Hamilton and Bernadine Bunny Engeldorf. Hamilton is also president of the Minnesota Nurses Association while Engeldorf is a MNA second vice president. 

The new national union, in the works since earlier this year, said its goals include organizing thousands of non-union nurses and winning national legislation that would establish minimum RN-to-patient staffing ratios and protect the role of RNs as patient advocates.

We are thrilled to get the union formed, Ross said in an interview with Finance & Commerce. We weren’t  sure we would be able to get it done this year.

Ross, also a MNA organizer, said the time is favorable for launching National Nurses United because Barack Obama is president and Democrats constitute the majority in the U.S. Congress.

We have a very friendly labor climate, said Ross, who has been a nurse for more than 35 years. Things were going poorly for labor for many decades. Now is the time to band together to use our clout and influence for things.

Part of the debate

Ross maintained that nurses should be a part of the national health care debate because they are the frontline caretakers of patients.

Jan Rabbers, spokeswoman for the 21,000-member Minnesota Nurses Association, agreed, saying, Nurses are taking their advocacy from the bedside to the political arena. We see what happens when patients don't get access to health care. They [patients] don’t get the right health care at the right time and they get the most expensive health care.

The NNU brings together prominent voices of direct-care RNs from coast to coast now represented by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, United American Nurses, and the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Some Minnesota Nurses Association leaders, like Hamilton, worked behind-the-scenes to form the NNU. Their push for the new national union came after MNA House of Delegates voted last year to withdraw from the American Nurses Association.

ANA has chosen to explore initiatives that no longer include the programs and core functions of a labor organization for nurses, effectively creating an untenable relationship for 97 percent of MNAs membership who are represented by union contracts the MNA said in a press statement last year.

Ross said the American Nurses Association is largely made up nurses who are employed by companies or are employer friendly. This one of the reasons why most of us have left [that association], she said.

Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul, said the formation of National Nurses United is an intriguing development for the labor movement given that very few nurses previously were organized.

About 25 years ago, nurses started shedding their ambivalence about organizing when growing numbers of them began to view their jobs as a career and wanted better pay and a say in the workplace, Rachleff said.

Rachleff noted the California nurses played a major role in the startup of National Nurses United, giving the new organization a political focus that looks not just at their own self-interests but what is best for patients.

Still, given how far Congress is down the road in considering national health care reform legislation, a big question is whether the new union is getting into the debate too late, Rachleff said. "That [health care debate] is in the red zone," he said drawing a football analogy.

Last week, the NNU tried to dispel that query as it held its first public action, a protest at the headquarters of an Arizona hospital association. And in a press statement, NNU's board promised to move quickly on organizing non-union RNs and establishing a more influential voice for nurses in Washington.

Ross said there is plenty of work for the new union to tackle. There are, for example, about 2 million nurses in America, but only a fraction of them are organized, she said.

Ross also said the new union plans to lobby for passage of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act.

"Poll after poll shows that given a choice, people would like to have a union,"she said. "But fierce employer opposition often prevents that from happening," she said.