5,000 Join California Nurses Association/Nurses Organizing Committee

by Mike Hall, Jan 10, 2008

More than 5,000 registered nurses in the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) are joining forces with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC).

In a telephone conference call today, PASNAP President Patty Eakin, an emergency room nurse at Temple University Hospital, said the affiliation with the now 80,000-strong CNA/NNOC means Pennsylvania nurses have

…greater opportunities to improve the working lives of nurses and the care they deliver to patients….When the collective voice of nurses is strengthened, the main beneficiaries are patients and their families.

Zenei Cortez, a registered nurse and a member of the CNA/NNOC Council of Presidents, says the two unions have worked together in the past and share the same goals for nurses and patients that include

…increasing the power of bedside nurses, promoting the health and well-being of patients against the erosion of patient protections, strengthening RN standards, winning RN-to-patient ratios and transforming our health care system.

Eakin says that along with an “aggressive organizing program” aimed at direct care nurses, winning passage of a RN-to-patient ratio law similar to California’s successful measure tops PASNAP’s agenda. California’s landmark RN-to-patient ratio law was enacted in 1999 and has led to major improvements in patient safety and working conditions for RNs. Says Eakin:

Every day, nurses work hard to save lives. We should never work short-staffed because it inevitably means that we cannot safely deliver care. Now that the facts have been established that California’s safe staffing bill has helped reverse the nursing shortage in California, Pennsylvanians should have to wait no more. What has been won in California should be won in Pennsylvania and nationwide for the sake of safe patient care.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says that with such deep problems in health care,

and such tremendous challenges facing working people, there is no more important time for nurses to unite for a stronger voice. The joining together of these two aggressive unions for registered nurses is great news.

Says CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro:

Our unity is a strong signal to nurses in Pennsylvania and other nurses across the nation of the opportunity for growth, a stronger voice in the workplace and the public arena.

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