Nurses Unions Merge to Gain Greater Voice in Health Care

by James Parks, Dec 8, 2009

Delegates to the founding convention of National Nurses United vote unanimously for the merger.

Delegates to the founding convention of the National Nurses United (NNU) yesterday created the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in U.S. history and immediately pledged to work to expand union representation of nurses and give them a greater voice in health care reform.

The NNU unites three nurses unions: the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), United American Nurses (UAN) and Massachusetts Nurses Association.

Karen Higgins, an RN from Massachusetts, and one of three newly elected co-presidents of the NNU, said:

The promise of the future has arrived with all the unlimited potential, creativity, vision, and power represented by the delegates in the room, and the 150,000 members of the founding organizations.

Delegates to the convention in Phoenix adopted a constitution and announced plans to move quickly on campaigns to:

• Advance the interests of direct care nurses and patients across the United States.
• Organize all direct care RNs “into a single organization capable of exercising influence over the healthcare industry, governments, and employers.”
• Promote effective collective bargaining representation to all NNU affiliates to promote the economic and professional interests of all direct care RNs.
• Expand the voice of direct care RNs and patients in public policy, including the enactment of safe nurse to patient ratios and patient advocacy rights in Congress and every state.
• Win “healthcare justice, accessible, quality healthcare for all, as a human right.”

“This is where we need to be, together as one, moving across the country,” said Jean Ross, secretary-treasurer of the UAN and a NNU co-president.

Some of us have been waiting our whole careers for this.

Co-President Deborah Burger, RN, of the CNA/NNOC added:

We are going to make sure we organize every single direct care RN in this country. RNs and our patients deserve to have a national nurses movement that can advocate for them.

“It’s a new day in America,” said CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro, and “it is 100 years overdue.”  

Stewart Acuff, assistant to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, told the delegates:

You are going to make a difference for this country by uniting your power and strengthening your voice.

The founding of the NNU is a major step forward in the fight to achieve health care for every American and to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, Acuff said.

 We can best lift America out of this recession by passing [the Employee Free Choice Act] and strengthening the ability of nurses and all workers to form unions and bargain collectively.  

NNU will be governed by an executive council, which comprises three co-presidents, a secretary-treasurer and 11 vice presidents. Delegates elected Martha Kuhl from CNA/NNOC as secretary-treasurer of the new union.

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