A Union for the People...

A union by the people, for the people. It's a nice thought, and I am sometimes comforted by the knowledge that the founders (okay, at least one founder) had it when deciding to overthrow a whole damn empire to create our country. Unionism is in the very roots of this republic of ours, even if we cannot all agree about what that means. We've never been a very agreeable sort anyway, when you get right down to it.

On a whim one night I looked up the history of the labor movement, and while I could find information going as far back as the 1600's I could not help but notice a most conspicuous absence. Us. Nurses. In the whole timeline of the labor movement, older than our own country, the nurse was nowhere to be found. I wanted to be outraged and surprised, but I wasn't. Not really.

Nurses just aren't very good at unions. There are probably a thousand reasons why, and certainly there are as many excuses, but the fact remains that we have been absent from these discussions even after we got our seat at the table. In the 1940's in case anyone was curious. I think that's why we're just not very good at it. That, and the fact that we've spent generations being told that we are good, and special, and kind. And we can be all of those things and still get mad, and show that anger to the world. But it's a whole lot harder to do so when it goes against every positive stereotype of your profession, something nurses famously hold a little too close to their identities.

A quick story. In Washington we have the Whoops program for healthcare workers who divert medications. When I was in nursing school one of the folks who run the program came to talk to us about it. And I'll never forget how he described nurses. Nurses, he said, more than any other group he deals with protect their identity as nurses. He told us that in the many years he had held his position he had come to realize that by the time a nurse was letting their addiction affect their working life, their identity as a nurse, it had most likely already consumed the rest of their life. Nurses, he said, will let the rest of their life fall to pieces but not their life as a nurse until things have gone almost too far.

Think about that for a moment. I've been thinking about it since I first heard it in 2016. As a type, nurses place such importance on their identity as a nurse that we will let addiction destroy every other aspect of our life before our coworkers start to notice something is wrong. I have a whole lot of words and opinions on why that might be, but I'll save them for another time. The point is, that we're not good at unions because we're nurses and unions aren't part of that identity.

And nurses don't get mad where people can see it. They don't press charges when assaulted by someone in their care. And they sure as hell don't put something as crass as wages and working conditions above the welfare of their patients.

What flavor is your cool-aid (it was really flavor-aid, but I digress). I prefer fruit punch myself.

The thing is, that there is literal decades of research showing that what is good for the nurses is inevitably good for the people in their care. By failing to adequately advocate for ourselves we are, in fact, failing to advocate for our patients in one of the most outstandingly egregious manners imaginable. And advocacy, as I am sure we all know, isn't always nice, or kind or comfortable.

Not for us, not for the communities we serve and certainly not for the people on the other side of the table.

Nurses unions, professional organizations, haven't been good at that. We've stood apart from the greater labor community and avoided the use of the tools they so effectively developed and deployed in the literal centuries they have been fighting the good fight.

That has to change.

A union is meant to be a group that comes together over collective concerns. It is meant to act, not to serve its own interests, but the interests of the majority of its members. A union is never supposed to tell you "we did this for your own good". Even if the members make a bad decision, if they pick an unwinable fight, the union is supposed to be there for them. There have been a lot of unwinable fights over the centuries, every single workers right we have had to be pried from the clawed and clutching grasp of those who benefit from our labor. But we get nothing by forever moving the goal post, by spending what leverage we have on things that protect the status quo while doing little to nothing to advance our actual cause.

It's time, well past time, to do something about it and take control of our union. Control of our careers. Time to make our collective voice, the largest in healthcare in the US, heard and leverage our importance to the system to the advantage of nurses and those we care for.

And that starts by getting angry enough to do something. Are you?

I am.