George Raine, Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle Thursday, February 19, 2009
The California Nurses Association, a union representing 75,000 registered nurses in five states, said Wednesday it is joining with two other nurses unions to create a 150,000-member advocacy association.
The move is more of an amalgamation than a merger, because the three unions will maintain their identities, but the new group is intended to give union-represented nurses a national voice and more organizing strength, said Debra Berger, president of the California Nurses Association based in Oakland.
The group will be called the United American Nurses-National Nurses Organizing Committee and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
The other unions in the group are the United American Nurses, based in Silver Spring, Md., with members in 12 states, and the Massachusetts Nurses Association, based in Canton, Mass., which has members in its home state and is conducting organizing campaigns in New Hampshire and Connecticut. The California Nurses Association also has members in Texas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.
The new association will provide nationwide coordination in the campaign for single-payer health care, as the proposal is taken up in Congress, said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association. "These are tremendous allies," she said of the two other unions representing registered nurses.
The association will seek to "organize all nonunion direct care RNs," and provide a national voice for nurses' rights, safe nursing practices including RN-to-patient ratios, and nurses' health care plans, the three unions said. The group also intends to create a national pension plan for union RNs.
The three unions said in a statement that "RNs should be represented by an RN union." This is in part an attack on the Service Employees International Union, which also represents nurses, among other health care workers. The California Nurses Association, in particular, has sharp differences with SEIU.
A spokeswoman for SEIU at its Washington headquarters, Michelle Ringuette, however, offered a conciliatory comment.
"We haven't seen the details and are looking forward to learning more about it," she said. "We're encouraged by the organization's stated goal to organize nonunion direct care RNs, and by its expression of solidarity with other nurse and allied unions. We're hopeful that this will move us closer to our ultimate goal - which is to have all nurse unions working together to organize the 85 percent of RNs who don't yet have a union voice."
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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