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Nurses to NLRB: We’re Not Supervisors |
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In Chicago, nurses took to the streets yesterday—literally sitting down in the middle of a busy intersection—to highlight an issue that centers on an obscure government agency with the power to take away the freedom from millions of workers to form unions.
That agency, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), although little-known to the public, interprets the nation’s mire of labor laws.
The NLRB now is deciding a series of cases in which the majority-Republican board could rule that nurses, as well as many other workers, are “supervisors,” a classification that legally would bar them from joining unions and being represented on the job. In fact, in one fell swoop, the NLRB could ban 8 million workers from joining unions.
The American Hospital Association (AHA), the umbrella group for the nation’s hospitals, has urged the NLRB to consider charge nurses as supervisors. At yesterday’s protest, which included the California Nurses Association (CNA), nurses rallied at the AHA building. CNA is the parent organization for the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which represents nurses in Cook County, Ill.
RNs Working Together, a coalition of unions that includes AFT Healthcare, the United America Nurses (UAN) and Steelworkers, said in a statement:
Nurses will not stand by and allow their union rights go up in smoke. It is imperative that hospitals and the NLRB acknowledge the importance of nurses as patient advocates and continue to recognize their right to union protection. Nurses can’t truly speak up for their patients if they fear jeopardizing their jobs, which is why they need a union behind them.
In July, nurses, media workers, construction workers, miners and other workers held rallies nationwide to demand the NLRB protect workers’ rights and not expand the definition of supervisor in what is collectively known as the “Kentucky River” cases.
Linda Warino, one of those who joined in the protests, has spent the past 33 years caring for patients as a nurse. As we noted here, Warino says her union, the Ohio Nurses Association/United American Nurses, empowers her and provides resources to bolster her expertise on health standards and practices:
Charge nurse duties have nothing to do with managerial work. They have to do with patient care work. Everyone knows I’m not their boss, the only people who don’t are the National Labor Relations Board.
If the NLRB thinks this change will help health care, that is absolutely not true. These decisions will further compromise patient care by taking away nurses’ ability to voice their concerns in a safe environment.
Historically, the NLRB has interpreted the supervisory exclusion narrowly, remaining true to the original language and goal of the Taft-Hartley Act, which first excluded supervisors from union representation.
However, two recent Supreme Court rulings—one in the early 1990s and another in 2001 (Kentucky River)—rejected these prior NLRB decisions. These decisions did not expand the definition of supervisory status, but they did create the opportunity for the Bush NLRB to broadly redefine supervisory status to exclude huge numbers of employees.
This NLRB needs to remain true to the language of the Taft-Hartley Act, congressional intent and prior NLRB decisions and craft a workable definition of supervisor that truly protects workers’ federal labor law rights.
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