I am a nurse at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md. Since spring 2016, the National Nurses United union has been conducting an aggressive organizing drive in our institution.
Union supporters are promising a lot of things to our co-workers. They claim the union can improve our nurse/patient ratio, increase our wages, protect our jobs, and save us from our horrible managers and supervisors.
There’s just one problem: None of this is true.
The NNU is promising things that can’t be delivered. Nurses at Providence Hospital, a unionized facility in our area, have reported to me that their net compensation and patient satisfaction levels have both decreased since they opted to join the NNU. In many hospitals, whatever wage gains made by the union are more than offset by union dues, which we would be forced to pay since Maryland is not a right-to-work state.
NNU dues can run up to $1,400 per year. This is a substantial amount of money. A Holy Cross nurse could buy almost two months’ worth of groceries for a family of four, almost a years’ worth of gasoline, almost half a years’ home energy bills, or a vacation for two to the Bahamas with that kind of money.
Those of us who oppose the union feel we know how better to spend our money than the union. We are also concerned that the NNU will add another layer of bureaucracy that could seriously compromise patient care. Despite union claims that strikes usually last 1-2 days, the recent strike at Allina in Minnesota didn’t end for more than 40 days. This had an enormous impact on each nurse’s personal finances, as well as negatively impacting patient care at the hospital, according to a Holy Cross colleague who worked there during the strike.
Union supporters at Holy Cross try to assure us that strikes are rare. But in 2016 alone, 4,000 Minneapolis union nurses (September 5), 1,300 Los Angeles union nurses (June 23), and 5,000 Twin Cities union nurses (June 19) went on strike. All of those nurses had patients who counted on them. All of those nurses chose the union over their patients. At Holy Cross, we don’t want to be put into a position where we would be pressured to abandon the people who depend on us, even for a little while.
According to Fiercehealthcare.com, “A 2012 review of 50 nursing strikes over the course of 20 years in New York found that the likelihood of readmissions and patient death both increased when a strike occurred.”
In other words, strikes are bad for patient care, which means unions are bad for patient care.
There are at least two reasons why joining the NNU will not result in increased patient satisfaction or nurse satisfaction at Holy Cross.
First, in a typical NNU collective bargaining agreement, the nurse/patient ratio is a management right, retained and vested exclusively in the hospital. Obviously the union can’t guarantee how many patients will come through the door on any given night, nor how many nurses may call out sick or be otherwise unavailable. So how can the union guarantee better ratios? They can’t.
Second, unions create and thrive in hostile work environments, creating an “us versus them” mentality, both between staff and management and among nurses. Many nurses choose to resign from union hospitals due to the contentious relationship that often develops. This in turn leads to an increase in staff turnover, which is not good for nurses, the hospital or the patients.
Most of my colleagues at Holy Cross are tired of the constant union agitation at our fine hospital. Most of us don’t agree with the union’s assessment of Holy Cross as a terrible place to work. Most of us get along with our directors, and are well pleased with our compensation and treatment by management.
It’s true that many of us wish the nurse/patient ratio were better, but those of us who have worked at union hospitals before (quite a few of us) know that unions don’t necessarily improve that situation, and in fact often make it worse.
For all of those reasons and more, we have formed a group called UnionFreeHC to push back against NNU propaganda, and to help educate our coworkers about the facts (supporters can check us out on Facebook or email us at [email protected]).
If the union feels it has the support of the majority of Holy Cross nurses — they need 50 percent plus one to win an NLRB election and become our exclusive bargaining representative — we wish they would hurry up and call for an election. But we suspect the reason they haven’t done so is because they know that the majority of our nurses do not want their representation.
We don’t need a union. And neither do our patients.
Sheila Vicenzi, RN, has been a nurse at Holy Cross for four years.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
