See this excellent article at http://www.labornotes.org/node/2138 that provides an overview of the nursing unions.
Hospitals and other healthcare organizations really need to start embracing nursing and moving forward now with treating nurses at true partners in the workplace. If you are in the C-Suite and don't know or have an ideas for what it takes to embrace nurses and nursing as true partners in the workplace, call me.
Maybe EFCA will challenge healthcare organizations to take nurse-management relations to the next level. That would be a nice by-product of the "EFCA scare" if it happens.
Nursing union leadership appear to be excited about EFCA (and they should be excited) which provides the first real opportunity to organize the majority of RNs in across the United States. It also provides nursing unions with the ability to do something nursing unions never had the power to do in the past: make the hospital C-suite and management shake in their boots.
I don't know if this is the beginning of the end or the end with a new beginning, but I said before it gives me blogging material anyway and probably additional license defense cases as this dance of Mortal Kombat plays out in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, community health settings, and other healthcare settings throughout the country. Why?
I am predicting there will be an increase in the number of complaints filed against nurses with State Nursing Boards related to the organizing of nurses and other issues in the workplace if EFCA passes. It is going to be ugly and messy and unfortunately I think individual nurses (who I represent, counsel, and advise and who I am concerned about) will be lost in the process in the dirty dance of power between nursing unions and healthcare facilities.
Comments