Dueling Nurses, Dueling Unions
By Dopeman Posted in Archived — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The above video is from the California Nurses Association web site. SEIU has a response video posted on their site:
After more than 3 years of fighting for the freedom to form a union, 8,000 Ohio nurses and healthcare workers saw their dreams derailed by the California Nurses Association.
Less than a week before they were finally set to vote in a democratic election, CNA flooded the state with hostile organizers and bombarded workers with wildly false, and misleading leaflets and phone calls urging them to vote against unionization.
CNA says:
Registered Nurses Beware...
The Service Employees union’s threat to RN patient advocacy and democratic rightsIn response to the growing national movement for ratios and greater RN power at the bedside and the public arena, the hospital industry is fighting back. They found a willing ally in the Service Employees International Union. SEIU is a non-RN union — only 2% of their members are RNs — for a reason: registered nurses know SEIU cannot be counted on to protect RN professional practice.
They negotiate deals with employers solely to gain new members, and in exchange they lobby against legislative reforms that would protect patients and accept contracts that weaken RN standards.
(emphases in both the above quotes added by me.)
It's the lead story on each of their front pages, seiu.org and calnurses.org and each has a site that specifically targets the other:
SEUI's:
ShameOnCNA.com
and
CNA's:
ServingEmployersInsteadOfUs.org
SEIU's video was posted on youtube on 4/2... I did a search here and haven't found anything on this. I'm going to skip the "Breaking" just in case this has been diaried and I missed it.
I saw the SEUI site first, the Shame on CNA site, and it sounded like CNA had blocked their attempt to unionize.
I'd guess a group trying to organize in Ohio would have a harder time than one trying to organize in California. Ohio's not a right to work state, yet, ... , but from what I can tell, they are in a place where it still taken seriously. A place where it has a chance to actually come to be and the Right To Work machine is actively angling for it. I couldn't find a California counterpart to the Ohio Right to Work News Page on the National Right to Work Committee site.
I think most people are familiar with Right To Work, anyone who has ever lived/worked in a RTW state knows it is some bad shit. RTW is to labor what the GWB Clear Skies Initiative is to air.
I can see how in a state like that, a group trying to organize would have to make some pretty serious concessions, and I'm sure the SEIU opinion is that it's a start, it's a union where there was none and that's good. And it is good. But in this case it seems that this goes beyond concessions - in this case they are bartering with patient safety.
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SEIU is national, and obviously much larger than CNA, but SEIU is only 2% RN's. CNA is 100% RN's. That means everything.
This is about patient safety. This is about allocating responsibilities and procedures previously requiring an RN to unlicensed staff. Or worse (and more likely), just assigning these procedures to less skilled staff while leaving responsibilities with a newly-classified-as-"management" RN.
If SEIU is really lobbying against legislation that would strengthen RN standards like nurse-to-patient ratio in exchange for contracts as CNA describes, that is really, really bad.
This is all you need to know about it:
...patients in our hospitals push a call button and wait ... and wait ... for a registered nurse to come to their aid. You could be one of those patients. You might be in severe pain, or frightened or disoriented. You need help, but you wait, sometimes for hours, to receive the care you need. Fortunately, in some cases the wait causes no serious harm. But with some frequency, the lack of a quick response from a nurse can trigger a downturn in a patient's condition, or lead to a serious and costly complication.
...
The cause of the poor staffing conditions in our hospitals is at the center of an intense debate being waged in hospital boardrooms, in the halls of Congress, and on Beacon Hill. Nurses on the frontlines - those who have been working in the system, those who actually answer those call lights, and struggle with increasing patient loads - know why: Patient care has fallen victim to short-sighted financial calculations.
Welcome back to RedState.
You appear to be describing a case where an aggressive union (SEIU) is trying to expand into a turf that CNA appears to have previously considered within its own domain. This sound like competition in action.
However, it's not clear to me why CNA intervened in an Ohio dispute, as the Ohio RNs apparently are not currently unionized and its not clear that how a California union could become the organizing union for Ohio nurses.
I'm also aware that SEIU is itself embroiled in an internal dispute between local officials and national leaders, which has been diaried here at RedState. This conflict has been especially acute in California, and I would be curious to know if there is some relationship between these local SEIU-CA leaders, who would be acquainted with CNA officers, and this effort of CNA to block an expansion of power for the national SEIU organization.
The comments at DKos alluded to CNAs lobbying for a single payer health care system, but it's not clear what is SEIU's position on a national health care system nor how this would translate to the Ohio dispute.
I guess what I'm saying is that you need to tailor this article better to myself and other RedState readers. Please try to connect some of the pieces better, filling in more of the background.
Please describe what you see as the conservative response to these several internal battles within the union movement and your reasons for that position, keeping in mind that many or most here at RedState tend to oppose unions in the first place as a gut reaction.
Or are you puzzled over this dispute and seeking readers here who might have more knowledge about the particulars of what's going on here (which I personally do not have).
Again, it's not clear what kind of response you are seeking from RedState readers here.
thought might have bipartisan appeal is the most important part: the fact that this outcome could affect patient care. How many RN's your hospital staffs matters to everyone, right and left.
When you are laying in a hospital bed in need of help, the outcome of union contracts like this will matter to you. If whether or not an RN is available to help you depends on which kind of union deal was brokered - even though you'd prefer there be no union at all - you should know about it.
Maybe a lot of people here won't know about it because they might not spend a lot of time thinking about differences/disputes among unions. The conservative response to any question about unions is to get rid of them, they are the problem. I understand that.
It's like I would like to see private insurance companies eliminated for a single-payer system. Ask me about a dispute between Pacificare and Cigna. I say get rid of them, they are the problem. But that doesn't mean that differences between them, or more importantly, how those differences influence public policy, don't affect my life in real ways.
"There comes a time when a rat's gotta ask himself: what's in it for the rat?" - Templeton
My gut feelings are that the Mr. Stern's drive to centralize power in SEIU and the consequent sacrifice of local worker concerns for increased numbers sounds like a power trip on his part that probably is not going to benefit the country.
It also seems likely that CNA's intervention is rooted in connections between CNA and the dissident SEIU-CA leaders like Sal Rosselli.
I heard/read that CNA doesn't like SEIU stepping on their desire to enact RN ratios into law, and SEIU is ticked at CNA's shagging their organizing drive.
It's also clear that establishing an optimal ratio between RNs and other nursing staff and para-medical technicians is something that is continually being evaluated, that may vary over time, and may vary from location to location depending on the amount and mix of qualified staff available.
This in turn makes me somewhat leary of legislating ratios into law that could be so inflexible (either presently or in the future) as to interfere with current practice or changes in practice down the line. Especially with the pace of changes going on in patient care as well as therapeutics.
One of the flaws of unions has been resistance to technological changes or to changes in market conditions/competing industries or to research on "best practices". Railroad unions is a classic historical example.
On the other hand, unions have acted as counterweights to managements that are too detached from workplace realities or unconcerned with worker safety, etc.
Thus, overly-simplistic responses like "get rid of unions" or "single-payer" - as those these will bring utopia - simply serve to short-circuit serious discussion.
So all the above set parameters for the issue of health care staffing. However, given the bitterness of the union dispute here, it's hard to evaluate whether patients are becoming pawns rather than their interests being primary. Or for that matter, are both these unions taking an approach that will interfere with optimal staffing because they have a myopia towards protecting the jobs of their constituencies, which tends to lock existing staffing mixes in place. That is, it's hard to see whether these unions need to be strengthened or weakened.
And I've certainly heard tales from practicing nurses about how union regulations have damaged patient care (as well as tales of hospital management understaffing).
So back to my question in the subject line: what do you offer in terms of sorting through the competing interests and competing narratives and agendas of SEIU and CNA? Or are both perhaps acting in a manner that will interfere rather than improve advances in patient care, either through putting too much drag on the system or via "unintended consequences"?
Your name says it all, accurately.