Last week, I read in the New York Times how the "unusually militant" California Nurses Association (CNA) swarmed into Ohio hospitals and broke up a scheduled union vote for some 8,300 Ohio hospital workers to join with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
It didn't make much sense to me: a union fighting another union and then robbing innocent workers of their chance to vote? Then I read further. According to the article, CNA believes that "skilled workers like nurses should belong to nurses' unions and not to unions of diverse workers like the service employees." In other words, CNA believes that the very organizations responsible for fairness in the workforce should actually divide workers and keep them from presenting a unified voice at the bargaining table.
To quote Senator Barack Obama, "that's just wrong-headed."
When I worked as a maintenance worker at a paper mill in my home state of Wisconsin, uniting all classes and all trades of workers was the only way we could succeed with our employer. We didn't just get together with other instrumentation workers; that would have been fruitless. I worked with the skilled electricians, millwrights, carpenters, plumbers, machine operators, line workers, and forklift operators. We even struggled arm-in-arm with the mill's cleaners -- workers who CNA would have labeled "unskilled" and excluded.
Even for people who haven't gone down the challenging and forever rewarding path of organizing a union, the CNA's strategy doesn't make any sense. Everyone knows that we can get a bigger piece of the pie if we work together. Divisions are exactly what keep us fighting over the crumbs down at the bottom.
In my opinion, the CNA practices an elitist craft unionism and doesn't understand the power of industrial unionism. Fine -- everyone's entitled to his or her opinion. But it's really not okay -- especially in an era when less than 8 percent of the private-sector is unionized -- to attack the efforts of SEIU, a union seeking to build a united voice for all workers in the workplace.
I'm 36 years old. Since 1998, I've fought my own personal battle for health care as a person living with multiple sclerosis (MS). No health insurance company will sell me health insurance or life insurance or long term care insurance.
That's why the strength and success of SEIU's campaign to get healthcare for all is so important to me. And it's why I won't stay silent when groups like CNA attempt to undermine SEIU's well-intentioned efforts for their own petty political gains.
So, to the California Nurse's Association, I say "knock it off." Go ahead and build your elitist union, but keep your hands off workers who want to stand united and get a bigger piece of the pie.