Labor & Employment Law

Nurses Union Rallies, Picks DeMoro as Executive Director

By James Parks

Members of National Nurses United (NNU) yesterday wasted no time in raising their voices in support of patients, nurses and working people. Just hours after formally creating the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in U.S. history, delegates to the NNU’s founding convention rallied  outside the Arizona Hospital Association offices in Phoenix.

They served notice they will challenge hospital industry attacks on nurses’ rights and fight to uphold workplace standards. The nurses also pledged to resist corporate cost-cutting measures that reduce patient care and raise nurse-patient ratios. The nurses called for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to enhance the ability of nurses and other working people to form unions.

NNU Co-President Jean Ross told the crowd that joining a union is the best economic stimulus package:

When workers have a greater voice to lift up their standards, all of America prospers. That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act, to restore balance to our system of labor law. The greatest economic stimulus, economic recovery plan would be to restore the right for more American workers to form unions and raise standards for themselves and their families and their communities.

The NNU unites three nurses unions?the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), United American Nurses (UAN) and the Massachusetts Nurses Association.

At its initial meeting, the NNU board selected Rose Ann DeMoro as the union’s executive director. DeMoro has served since 1993 as executive director of the CNA/NNOC, and she also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council.

The NNU board also promised to move quickly on an ambitious agenda of organizing nonunion RNs across the nation, defending and advancing the interests of direct-care RNs and patients, establishing a more influential voice for RNs in Washington, passing key patient care reforms such as national nurse-to-patient ratios and building stronger international ties with nurses around the world.

Another of the three new NNU co-presidents, Karen Higgins, pointed to the nurses’ crucial fight for better patient care:

We know the consequences of bottom-line medicine that puts our patients at the mercy of protocols designed to meet budgets rather than patient needs. We know what happens when hospital and insurance companies collude to barter human lives for money?people suffer and the executives and the corporations prosper. We know what works, and we will not go away until we win the protections our patients need.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on December 09, 2009 (boomark / email).