Nurses Unionize to Improve Patient Care

America’s nurses are on the march — literally and figuratively.

Consider just two recent developments:

In Minnesota, 12,000 nurses from 14 hospitals walked off the job for a day last month, the largest such action in U.S. history, in a bid to improve staffing levels and to secure standardized nurse-patient ratios.
In Texas, almost 2,000 nurses at five hospitals voted to form unions in a two-week period ending in June. This was particularly notable because Texas has the third largest number of RNs in the country — after California and New York — but previously only one private hospital in Texas was organized.

What on earth is going on, you might ask. We’re constantly told that the American labor movement is in decline. And a report by the Labor Department informed us last week that strikes are sharply down nationwide — only five major strikes or work stoppages in 2009, compared with an annual average of 83 during the 1980s.

Labor is indeed on the defensive these days. But nurses are among the nation’s fastest-growing segment of union members. Twenty percent of nurses are organized, about twice the average for workers as a whole — and the figure is growing.

The story behind this is intriguing on several levels.

Nurses have been unionizing not to secure bigger salaries for themselves — but rather to improve patient care. They contend that a collective voice will help them advocate for patients while protecting their jobs as they do so.

This effort, they say, has become all the more important with the increasing corporatization and bottom-line orientation of the medical profession. Staff reductions aimed at cost-cutting have raised patient-to-nurse ratios even as greater demands are placed on remaining nurses, allowing them less time and flexibility to care for their patients.

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THE WASHINGTON TIMES