The California Nurses Association made a few headlines recently when a new nurses union out of Pennsylvania voted to affiliate with them. The CNA has become one of the fastest growing union in the country, bringing together nurses on conjoined demands of better work standards, patient care, and promotion of national single-payer health care. They currently represent about 75,000 nurses. Their greatest success to date has been capping the patient:nurse ration in the state of California. I'm going to repost the note on their new affiliation published in The Nation below. I'm also posting links to the recent AFL-CIO press release, their website, and the website of the national organizing organization. They're organizing in Texas right now.
5,000 Join California Nurses Association/Nurses Organizing Committee
California Nurses Association (CNA)
National Nurses Organizing Committee
NURSES, UNITED: The California Nurses Association (CNA) is one of those rare unions that really make you believe in the future of organized labor. Its members conducted an extraordinary campaign in 1999 to pass a state ballot measure capping patient-to-nurse ratios. When Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to block its implementation, the union launched an all-out assault, hounding him into retreat. While some unions have welcomed a role for private insurers in healthcare reform, CNA has focused relentlessly on single-payer, launching CheneyCare, a campaign arguing that every American deserves the kind of publicly funded health coverage that saved the veep's life. In 2004 the union went national, which inevitably meant going head-to-head with SEIU, home to Andy Stern, whose own healthcare reform strategy has brought him into an alliance with Wal-Mart execs. After being independent for 100 years, CNA moved last May to affiliate with the AFL-CIO, an indication that the union was ready to play hardball.
This combination of radicalism and realpolitik won the union a big prize January 10, when a young, 5,100-member Pennsylvania nurses union (PASNAP) voted to join CNA. PASNAP president Patricia Eakin, a working RN, said CNA carried the day with its "push for higher nurse-to-patient ratios," its "assertive, aggressive approach to organizing nurses" and its affiliation with the AFL-CIO, "because they support Medicare for all." The Pennsylvania victory came just after CNA, now 80,000 strong, unionized hundreds of nurses in Whittier, California, and Reno, Nevada. CNA president Zenei Cortez, also a working nurse, said her union is now organizing in Ohio, Kentucky and Texas (where it will be in direct competition with SEIU). When asked whether SEIU had competed for the Pennsylvania nurses, she said, "There might have been some rumblings, but those nurses really wanted us. You can't even compare us with SEIU. We're the nurses at the bedside, not administrators, and we run our organization. We want to be the national voice for RNs, and we want to get everybody on the same page with universal, single-payer healthcare.