Economy killers II
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Nurses enlist AFL-CIO clout
Hospital workers fight to cut hours, raise pay
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Daniel Mears
"We can't keep going like this," said Cheryl Johnson, a critical care nurse at the University of Michigan Health System. Johnson has pushed her union to join the AFL-CIO in a vote that will take place on Thursday.
By Sarah A. Webster
BRIGHTON -- A quiet lakeside community seems an unlikely setting for plotting a health care revolution. But this is home to Cheryl Johnson, the angry leader of United American Nurses -- the nation's largest registered nurses union.
Here, in this tree-canopied neighborhood surrounding Fonda Lake, Johnson is plotting to organize more of the nation's key professional health care givers. And she is willing to wield the ultimate labor weapon -- a strike -- if necessary to improve the nurse's lot.
While protests and walkouts could disrupt care for patients, Johnson said the quality of care is already suffering as nurses drag through 16-hour workdays hoping they don't make mistakes. She blames a nationwide nursing shortage, caused by low pay and poor working conditions.
"We can't keep going like this," said Johnson, who worked her way up through the Michigan Nurses Association to become the first president of the two-year-old union, the labor arm of the American Nurses Association. "I'm the one running industrial strength drugs into your body."
On Thursday, delegates of the 100,000-member nurses union are expected to vote to join the powerful AFL-CIO, a move crafted by Johnson.
"Nurses have issues -- major issues -- and the best way to get together to solve these is to do it with numbers," said Johnson, a Dearborn native who still works part-time as a critical care nurse at the University of Michigan Health System.
Affiliating with the 13-million member AFL-CIO -- which will cost unionized nurses about 50 cents a month -- could help force important improvements, such as limits on mandatory overtime and higher staffing levels.
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Chronic shortage
These problems are linked to a chronic nursing shortage. It is estimated that there are 125,000 nurse vacancies in hospitals nationwide. In Southeast Michigan, there are about 2,000 empty nursing positions. Twenty percent of nursing jobs are expected to be vacant by 2020.
"More organization, more strikes" are the ways to improve conditions so nursing can become an attractive career again, Johnson said.
That trend is already under way. There have been seven nursing strikes in the first half of this year, and 13 in 2000, United American Nurses reports. By contrast, there were four nursing strikes in 1995.
In November, 600 nurses at McLaren Regional Medical Center in Flint went on strike until the hospital agreed to overtime limits nine weeks later.
Rick Wade, senior vice-president of the American Hospital Association, said more nursing strikes would frighten the public and hurt patients. But, he noted, they could help emphasize the need for better health care funding.
Balanced budget blamed
The crisis in nursing -- and most of health care -- was caused in part by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which led to more than $100 billion in cuts through 2002 in Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly. Tight-fisted managed care policies and state efforts to put poor and disabled Medicaid beneficiaries into managed care programs are also blamed.
One-third of the nation's hospitals are operating in the red today, Wade said. These financially squeezed hospitals have tried to save money by using less expensive nurses aides in the place of registered nurses and making other cuts, which nurses and doctors complain prevent them from doing their jobs correctly.
Many nurses have abandoned their profession in this increasingly stressful environment.
"More and more health care is about money, and it crashes into what nurses are taught," Johnson explained.
All but one of the dozen or so nurses at Deckerville Community Hospital quit their jobs in early June, after the 15-bed hospital in Sanilac County reduced the number of registered nurses on duty. Most remain on staff only as "casual relief," but the hospital was forced to close the emergency room, said hospital President Ed Gamache.
The staffing change would have saved the hospital, which has an annual revenue of $3.5 million and has lost $1.5 million over the past three years, an estimated $80,000 this year.
Seeking union help
More health care workers than ever seem to be turning to unions for help under conditions like these. In June 1999, both the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association voted to form national labor unions.
The AMA's union, called Physicians for Responsible Negotiation, has organized just two unions -- the first was a group of doctors at the Wellness Plan, the Detroit-based health maintenance organization.
But nurse organization has been far more successful. Unionization among nurses has grown from 16 percent of nurses in 1990 to 19 percent of the country's 1.3 million hospital nurses in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Nurses belong to a variety of state, local and national unions. United American Nurses is the largest registered nurses union, and it is also trying to form unions at more than a dozen health systems in the United States.
Nurses in the American Nurses Association decided a labor arm was needed as some state nurse associations increasingly called for a tougher stance against worsening working conditions, and other nurses in right-to-work states asked the ANA to retreat from those union causes. The ANA, which has 2.6 million members, saw the creation of the labor arm as a way to separate labor issues from the ANA's primary function as a professional organization.
For the AFL-CIO, which is trying to build membership, the move will mean affiliation with the esteemed ANA.
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Area short of nurses; care suffers
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