Oregon Nurses Fight For First Contract Under Decertification Threat

http://www.laborradio.org/node/3950




Tomorrow mornings radio news tonight. Audio at link.

Oregon Nurses Fight For First Contract Under Decertification Threat

By Jesse Russell

Nurses at Oregon's Mercy Medical Center are at odds with the hospital over contract negotiations. The nurses voted to unionize in January and if a contract cannot be reached b the end of the year the union will be decertified. On Monday they appealed to Congressman Peter DeFazio for help. The Oregon congressman is a supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act which would help strengthen the rights of workers to organize. Tom Chamberlain is President of the Oregon AFL-CIO. He spoke of how the Mercy nurses symbolize what is happening across the United States:

: "The nurses are a good symbol of what's going on in this country. It's very difficult to form a union. In the state of Oregon, roughly 30 percent of the workforce in the 1970s were represented by unions to 16 and a half percent today."

Chamberlain cited a recent poll that shows if given the opportunity nearly half of all workers would join a union.

: "A lot of things are going on in this country today to discourage or take away the right to join a union from people who want to join unions."

Posted 08/14/2006 - 6:30pm

remember what happened last time they (Ah-nold) did that!!!

:bounce:

because nurses are focusing on the brutal working conditions they're facing, the short staffing that puts patients at risk, and the constant idiocy by management that dictates the floors be staffed to take care of stable patients, not sick ones.

There would be no nursing shortage in this country if the horrible working conditions in hospitals and extended care facilities were ever addressed. Fully half of RNs have dropped out of the profession due to miserable working conditions.

Since everybody's going to get sick at some point, this is everybody's fight.

I only went back as far as last Friday to find all of these. My International has a nurses unit. Your right. It is a fight we all need to win.

http://www.afscme.org/workers/68.cfm




Strike 'a possibility' at O'Fallon High

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/metroeast/story/F661DADCE4B15CE5862571CA000DAD33?OpenDocument

Nurses' pact heads off Robert Wood Johnson strike

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/new_jersey/15268719.htm

Ellis Hospital nurses approve contract with 2.2% salary increase

http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2006/08/14/daily3.html?jst=b_ln_hl

Finley Nurses Prepare To Strike

http://www.kwwl.com/Global/story.asp?S=5275179&nav=2Ifu

Hospital: Tentative agreement with nurses

http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060814/NEWS03/608140330/1007/NEWS03

Hospital nurses reach tentative deal, avert strike

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2OTc1Njc3

Finley nurses vote for second strike

http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2006/08/12/news/breaking_news/doc44dda7a170efc787637639.txt
http://www.woi-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5272185&nav=1LFX

School nurses seek same pay as teachers

http://www.milforddailynews.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=97336

Nurses reach contract with RWJ-New Brunswick

http://www.c-n.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/FRONT01/60813002

Nurses Ratify Contract At St. Francis West

http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/employment/9669878/detail.html

Bonner General nurses plan vote on unionizing
Low wages, grievance policies weigh in latest attempt

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/business/story.asp?ID=144399

Nurses agree to new Ellis contract

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=507783&category=REGION&newsdate=8/12/2006

Phila. hospital, nurses, reach contract deal

http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2006/08/07/daily43.html?jst=b_ln_hl

Providence charged with anti-union tactics

http://www.sentinel.org/articles/2006-32/14869.html

September date set for nurses' vote on union

http://www.appeal-democrat.com/articles/2006/08/12/news/local_news/news3.txt

Workers at Catholic Healthcare West reach tentative deal

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/15255098.htm

Hospitals' union workers reach tentative agreement

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/08/12/BUGJ4KH9KI1.DTL&type=business

St. Joe's reaches tentative agreement with CNA on contract

http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_4167315

Nurses plan to vote Tuesday

http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=13800

and not in the North...one look at their website's map of facility locations tells the story. They can screw the nurses easier in the Southern states, no unions.

The crap that my Texas facility gets away with would never happen elsewhere. Patient/nurse ratio gets higher and higher, nurses floated to units that they have no business going to, etc..

Pile all of that crap on top of the never ending paperwork we have to do, all the tasks that really should be done by support staff so we can give the bedside nursing care that we have been educated/trained to give, you start to wonder if their goal is to eliminate any support staff and just have us do all the cooking, cleaning, trash/laundry emptying, labs, secretarial, and anything else that comes up.

I spend more time on my shift getting food for people from our unit's mini kitchen than I do giving nursing care sometimes. Lunch **and** dinner trays left in the rooms all day long, who gets to take them away? The night shift nurses. Trash and laundry taken out? Night nurses. The list of "new things to do" never ends.

that they would be better off with a union and why not have one. Another nurse almost spit on me for saying that. She clearly diod not support unions and that was the case with other soutern nurses as well. The word union in the south foir some reason carries a bad connotation. I now live in N. Cali. and have belonged to the CNA and have seen two sides to the issue. However patients are better off with a nurse who has a union behind her.Patient safety is a number one reason all nurses should be in unions. Administartors of hospitals simply see us as numbers to crunch.

trained to think that unions are bad.

I find the same thing here in East Tennessee.

A company here closed its doors and moved its manufacturing back to Iowa where it had a union contract that said any consolidation would move production to the union plants first. Laborers here were upset with the company. I told them it demonstrated the power of a union and if they had one they wouldn't have been on the losing end.

They didn't believe me.

Maybe they'll think about it and realize it someday.

It's obvious that republinazis hate nurses, & have no respect for their skills.

you in your tracks if you start to think about rejoining the profession.

The facility that I work at doesn't understand the word "acuity" when it comes to staffing, a patient is a patient whether they are up walking in the hall or they are total care, near death's door needing massive amount of bedside nursing care...except when it was time for JACHO to come around and then staffing is made the way it SHOULD be. Our floor didn't admit patients the week JACHO came, staffing was wonderful, safe, etc..
Literally, the night *after* JACHO came, we got 9 admissions. They had been blocking admissions and keeping patients on other floors because the LAST time JACHO did their inspection, our floor threw up red flags w/ patient falls, poor documentation about other stuff..so the hospital arranged it to cut the number of patients in half.
We had 18 patients when we normally run in the 30's. No patients there means no charts for JACHO to scour over, no charts means less chance to find stuff wrong...MORE importantly, the nurses had SAFE nurse/patient ratio and things ran the way they are supposed to---**safely**.

Another example:
When our hospital census runs low, it is the nurses that get screwed..full time nurses get canceled in a heart beat. Some have gone weeks without getting a full paycheck due to getting cancelled. Does administration suffer when the census is low?? Hell no, they come to work and get paid the full check. Not the nurses, though. It's not like the nurses can only pay half their bills one month and say to their utlities/creditors "sorry, I got short paychecks every week".

My floor has had 80% turnover in the last year..management says it's because the nurses come to my floor "to get their year of experience" and then they go elsewhere. Bullshit. That may be true for nurses who go and work at the best damn hospital in town that will give them tons and tons of exposure to awesome cases/scenarios (like our local trauma center--Parkland Hospital)---but at OUR facility, we burn them out in less then a year, they are clawing at the door to leave within months of getting hired, when reality kicks in. Some have left during orientation.

SORRY to rant, this whole thing is a sore subject to me (as a nurse for 15 years, I've seen the same greedy hospital tactics year after year).

but nurses are expected to do superhuman work, while being paid subhuman wages. One of the biggest problems in the health care field is that HMOs are sucking up enormous numbers of health care dollars, and their main objective is to deny as many claims as they can.

We need universal health care here, the way other, more enlightened countries have. It's just plain wrong for big insurance companies to be draining away so much of the cost of health care. The wrong people are being rewarded in health care, and the ones getting the most are the big shots in insurance, who provide no patient care whatsoever.

:kick:

http://www.afscme.org/members/10634.cfm

Since several nurses have made comments about this, I thought I'd post the AFSCME nurses online video. Enjoy.

these stalled negotiations are a back door way to bust the union, in the same way that stop losses are meant to be a back door draft for the military. I am a Nurse, live in Texas and belong to a Union. I do not like non Union facilities. Most Nurses don't like to join Unions but I am here to tell you-it may be the only way to save the profession. Nurses will organize and strike for their patient before they strike for themselves.

When Nurses tell me that it is unprofessional to unionize I counter...are pilots unprofessional, or scientist, or teachers, or Doctors because there are many that are in unions. I always hit them with the fact that Albert Einstein was smart enough to see the benefits of a union (see my sig line)and was a card carrying union member.

I am very proud of my Union membership. It is the only way that I can protect my practice and insure that I can safely care for my patients. The Health Care CEO's want to make Nursing a piecemeal job (much like what happened to the meat packers unions). They want to delegate parts out like assembly components so that cat scans are read by radiologists overseas on some night shifts (which raising some serious license to practice issues for me). Well that might be fine and dandy, but what that does is give the CEO's the green light to cut local staff and next thing you know there are no Americans doing the job. They are saying that now about Nurses, but the truth is that the job conditions are so unsafe as to send the good safe Nurses packing.

I think we should have universal coverage for basics and folks could by insurance coverage for additional service. For example....a child (or adult)with with diabetes is covered but a child (or adult) requiring multiple organ transplants would not. But folks could buy private insurance as a supplement to cover extras.

Folks, please support your Nurses. They are health cares last best hope.

You deserve just as much financial compensation, Bonuses, and Perks, as any other college trained proffessional. Go get them.