With a big decision expected soon from the Bush National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that could further erode fundamental workers’ rights, nurses are fighting back. Some 7,000 nurses and other health care workers in nine New Jersey hospitals voted overwhelmingly to strike if they cannot reach a fair contract agreement. Continuing negotiations at all nine hospitals are focused on safe staffing ratios and working conditions and retirement security.
Tonight, the nurses and their allies in the union movement and the community will rally to protect their rights.
Janet Bass of AFT’s communications department sent this information:
While the NLRB is considering how to stick it to nurses and unions and patients, the AFL-CIO isn’t waiting around for the boom to hit. What better place than Liberty Park in New Jersey, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, to kick off a national campaign on nurses’ right to union protection.
Tonight, RNs Working Together, a coalition of eight AFL-CIO unions representing more than 200,000 registered nurses, will join AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, leaders and members of AFT Healthcare’s New Jersey union (Health Professionals and Allied Employees) and other unions, to say loud and clear that the NLRB should not mess with workers’ union protection.
The nurses are seeking a union voice at work to speak out for high patient care standards, safe staffing levels and other health care concerns.
In 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in NLRB v. Kentucky River Community Care that made it easier for employers to argue that RNs are “supervisors” and therefore ineligible to join unions. The Bush NLRB is expected to decide sometime this summer which private-sector nurses should be considered supervisors. Three cases—Oakwood Healthcare Inc., Golden Crest Healthcare Center and Croft Metals Inc.—have been combined and are now under consideration that could label millions of nurses as supervisors. This decision could seriously affect the freedom of nurses and millions of other workers across the nation to join unions.
The issue is whether skilled workers, like nurses, should be considered supervisors because, on the basis of their greater knowledge and expertise, they give instructions to lesser skilled employees about how and when to perform certain tasks. For example, registered nurses who tell nurse’s aides to perform certain tasks for particular patients and journeymen/building trades workers who direct other workers on a crew are in real danger of being falsely categorized as management under a new interpretation of the law. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does not protect the right of supervisors to join unions and permits employers to discipline or fire them for supporting the union.
An unfavorable decision by the NLRB—which is becoming increasingly hostile to workers as President Bush’s appointees settle in—would allow employers to reclassify nurses and other workers as “supervisors” to avoid recognizing or bargaining with their unions.
NLRB decisions already have stripped workers’ federally protected freedom to form unions. A bad ruling in this case would label millions of workers as supervisors and remove them from coverage by the NLRA, further constricting the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively.
Currently, 135 cases are being held up at the NLRB waiting for these decisions; 60 are union election cases. In some of these cases, workers who voted on forming a union several years ago are still waiting for their ballots to be counted. If the NLRB issues a broad decision, many of the workers who voted in these elections will never have their votes counted.
