Just Work: United We Stand, Divided We Fall

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.

Comments

[andrea22]

Check out this video that has actual CHP workers talking about what happened in Ohio. Their beef does not seem to be with the process or with SEIU, but with CNA's interference in their vote.

www.seiu1199.org

To me, this video and the workers in it are much more compelling than arguments about who "filed" the election. Any way you argue this one, these workers do not have a union today. If not for the CNA, that might be different. Pretty sad for working people in Ohio.

[CaliforniaNurse]

For the full story on SEIU's anti-democratic, pro-corporate record, please visit www.ServingEmployersInsteadofUs.org .

SEIU has 14 supporters at 5 hospitals after 3 years of organizing. That is a failed organizing drive, and the reason that Andy Stern had to make a deal with the employers. What do you give up when you depend on corporations and employers for members? The ability to truly advocate for patients.

[uniondoctor]

As a professional and a union member, I heartily agree that CNA's elitest position isn't going to give us the strength to not only protect our own interests but the quality of care our patients receive. I have worked the past 17 years (of my nearly 40 year career) for Kaiser Permanente. Across the nation we have a coalition of KP unions that consists of 86,000 members--from professionals to nurses to environmental workers, to clerks and lab techs. Our National Agreement, bargained in a Labor Management Partnership fashion (the largest such partnership) in the world has brought us better benefits and salaries but also insured that quality of care is the top priority for both sides. CNA has opted out of the Partnership and bargains with Kaiser on their own. We're have our own interior struggles in the union between UHW and SEIU International but hopefully that will be resolved through upcoming mediation. I find myself squarely on the side of UHW is this struggle because I believe that every member should have a voice, especially in bargaining and that quality of care for patients should be a part of every contract. We're not a country club--we don't just need more members as seems to be the position of the International. Regardless of the drawbacks and the in-fighting, we, as professionals are still better off in the union that out of it.

[LeftRight]

Isn't this why we have the AFL/CIO? Weren't they both formed to ensure that differing groups could stand together? That's what I remember from my history lessons!

[praxis00]

Hold your horses. I've seen a lot about this in the papers in Ohio, and it's pretty straightfoward.

There were tons of nurses and resp techs and other hospital folks battling the Catholic health system for years - literally years - with SEIU's help. It took years of letters and the actions and the lawsuits and organizing to make the hospitals listen to reason and give the workers a chance to vote, and who was it who helped these workers? Not a group of California nurses who turn their noses at the idea that janitors might share the same union as RNs.

So after the hospital and the union agreed to rules - that there would be NO INTERFERENCE (and isn't that the goal, people? That workers could actually make a free choice?), CNA came in, disguised themselves as pizza delivery folks, pretended to be visiting sick patients (which is unconscionable) and jammed up the floors, demanding that the nurses take their literature and listen to their lies.

One really important point that gets lost here: CNA never tried to organize a single worker in these hospitals. They weren't even trying to get on the ballot.

CNA - as a woman and a feminist, I totally reject and am embarrassed by your pseudofeminist rhetoric. Your practices are anything but women friendly. You just denied 8,000 workers a chance at a better wage, better benefits and a stronger voice on the job. How proud you must be.

[ci]

Charles Idelson, CNA/NNOC:

That's a curious title for a column from a staffer for the union that left the AFL-CIO and has worked feverishly to fracture the labor movement.


Regarding Ohio, here's comments from CNA/NNOC's Council of Presidents, Deborah Burger, RN, Zenei Cortez, RN, Geri Jenkins, RN, and Malinda Markowitz, RN:

Two organizations with an overwhelmingly male hierarchy, SEIU and the Catholic Healthcare Partners chain, concocted a pact to impose a union on registered nurses and other employees who are mostly women, without their consent.

We are not chattel to be bought and sold on the market, in secret deals by men who think they know what is in our best interest and who should represent us. We will not stand by while are constitutional rights are compromised and bargained away, not in Ohio, not anywhere else.

RNs across the U.S. have seen this attitude before, one of many reasons so many are choosing to join CNA/NNOC, and why so many SEIU RN members are looking for ways to get out.

In Ohio:

1. The employer, not the union, filed for the election, without a single signed union card requesting SEIU representation, and manipulated labor law to prevent anyone else being on the ballot.
2. The election was called off by the employer and SEIU, not by NNOC/CNA. If the employees really wanted to be represented by SEIU, why not just go ahead with the election?.

[OhioNurse]

I don't seem to understand why the cna feels that nurses being in a service union is beneath them. The last time i checked all workers in hospitals are providing service. So, that makes them service employees! I work at a CHP hospital in lorain where we held stress free, intimidating free election and i am excited to have other workers join us. It will only makes us STRONGER TOGETHER!

[OhioRN]

What CNA did was unconscionable, and, now to justify it by calling it male chauvinism is just insane. It revisits truly ugly mindsets that have nothing to so with the facts here. That's just another one of the false spins CNA to ahas tried to assign to this legal free and fair election--to justify their unethical tactics. They know that NLRB rules prohibit 'company unions', but they call SEIU moniker regardless of facts--they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They know CHP is historically anti-union, but they have persisted in creating their own reality--it's pure fantasy.
I'm so glad they don't represent me--

[Scott4Walks]

Thank you OhioRN! Like the SEIU nurses, for whom I work and from whom I receive care, I look forward to the day when you too have an SEIU union contract along with all of your co-workers at your hospital. I know that together we are all stronger in our shared effort to achieve quality, affordable health care for everyone and dignity and respect on the job.

I'm glad that you won't be distracted by CNA. Tens of thousands of SEIU member RNs and a million plus SEIU Healthcare members are with you.

- Scott

[nightnurse]

I am sorry misunderstood information was published. Please correct me if you have all the facts because I do not.
The way I read it is that the employer filed for a union election to occur in less than two weeks. Neither the employer, the union, nor the workers were permitted to discuss the upcoming election.
A committed group of employees had been working to bring a union into their hospitals for several years.
Many if not most of the employees found out about the election when they got a letter in the mail with the date a two "hot line" phone numbers and packets from the union and employer in the same envelope as educational information on which to base their vote.
Some of the nurses were already working with the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) to improve patient protection laws. One or more of them called to ask about the election.
Some nurses and workers from the NNOC came to Ohio and handed out brochures to RNs. I think I even saw a banner held by a handful of people in a newspaper article. It was windy and snowing.
I have two questions:
1. Why called off the election and why?
2. Will there be a conventional union vote preceeded by a card chesh of 30% of the workers?
I want the writer to know that the CNA has been working for single payer healthcare for decades. http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/