Nurses told: Build bonds with RNs outside NYS service

By SHERRY HALBROOK
A record number of nurse delegates attending their annual luncheon at the PEF convention last month in Lake Placid heard a consistent message from their leaders and guest speaker: The “U” in Union is “You.”

“We take on other people’s suffering as if it were our own, and that creates a bond between us,” said PEF Region 12 Coordinator Dee Dodson, a nurse and the new chair of the PEF’s statewide Nurses’ Committee. “I want you to use that bond between you and other nurses to help them get more involved in PEF and nursing issues.”

PEF President Ken Brynien and luncheon speaker Anne Goldman, chair of the NYS United Teachers Health Care Professional Council, told the nurses that in addition to their long campaign for safe staffing and an end to mandatory overtime, they may even have to fight for their right to be in a union.

Goldman, a nurse, reminded the PEF nurses of a decision by the National Labor Relations Board that essentially defines “charge” nurses at private hospitals and nursing facilities as supervisors and, therefore, ineligible to belong to a union or earn overtime.

“They are starting by applying this only to the private sector,” she said, “but it will come to us unless all nurses and unions fail to unite and defeat it now.”

Employers want to keep nurses out of the unions, Brynien said, because “you complain about injustices and poor patient care. It’s not so much that they want to break the union, as it is that they just want to keep you quiet and make you do what you’re told.

“Right now, the (NLRB’s) Kentucky River Decision only applies to private hospitals, but believe me, they’re up night and day working to find a way to apply this to the public-sector too,” Brynien said.

He urged the PEF nurses to reach out now to private-sector nurses and their union leaders.

“We can be the countervailing voice” against those who put profits or financial interests over the medical needs and quality care for patients, Goldman told the nurses.

“So many working people don’t have a voice because they aren’t in unions,” she said. “We can deliver the message that it’s not OK to just create jobs, you also must have boundaries, standards and best practices.”

Too often, workers are “afraid to rock the boat,” she said, “but every time you don’t make your claim, or speak out, you’re helping to erode the protections we all have worked for.

Unions must be the countervailing force against the profit-making force,” Goldman emphasized.

“Think of the burden you would have without your union. The success of one is truly the success of many.”

To illustrate her point, Goldman told of volunteering to work at a Special Olympics games and seeing a runner stumble and fall in a race. The other runners all stopped and went back to help him to his feet, she said, and then they linked arms and all finished the race together, in shared triumph.

She urged union members to learn from that example, and to speak up, not just for themselves, but for others as well.

“We need to help them (private-sector nurses),” Brynien said. “If we ignore them when they need help, they will ignore us when we need it. If we can’t see that we’re all in the same boat, it will sink.”