Across the country —from Palo Alto to El Paso, Maine to Miami—nurses and other activists rallied today in the late winter sun to lobby Congressional lawmakers for a tax on Wall Street’s riskiest transactions.

Minnesota Nurses Came out to support the Robin Hood Tax

With placards, bullhorns and banners that asked “How do we cure economic inequality and heal America?” scores of RNs with National Nurses United took to the streets in 25 cities bedecked, appropriately enough in bright red smocks, and green archery caps—the colors of Robin Hood—joining scores of other supporters of the Inclusive Prosperity Act re-introduced last month by Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota). “Pass the Robin Hood Tax HR 1464,” was the response.

Health GAP and Vocal NY turned out at the New York City vigil

Economists believe the legislation would raise between $300 and $350 billion annually, by adding a nickel sales tax to every $10 traded in Wall Street stock trades, with lesser amounts for speculative trades of currencies, derivatives and other financial transactions.

Atlanta VA and PDA Nurses

Supported by National Nurses United and more than 170 other national organizations representing millions of trade union members, religious groups, environmentalists, politicians, anti-poverty activists, clerics and health advocates the Robin Hood tax could close any number of gaping holes in America’s social safety net. Just a short list includes the funds needed for guaranteeing healthcare for all, eradicating HIV/AIDS, real action on climate change, building affordable housing, creating good jobs with decent wages, relieving students of their student loan debt, or even, by some estimates, ending poverty altogether.

Nurses and Allies in Texas at Beto O’Rourk’s office

Today’s nationwide rallies followed the 47th anniversary since the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose calls for a more just America, and a Beloved Community, are consistent with the proposal for a Robin Hood Tax. A budget, King often said, is a moral document; starved by the politics of austerity for far too long, America’s working classes and poor are overdue for replenishment.

Friends of Earth, ATU and Food and Water Watch in Maryland

Nurses held a wide variety of signs that pleaded for passage of the tax, some adorned with photographs of King. In El Paso RNs Luis Velez and Sylvia Searfoss crowded into the office of Congressman Beto O’Rourke, holding a sign emblazoned with King’s image, and quoting him saying: “This is America’s opportunity to bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether we have the will.”

De Saulnier dons the green cap in California!

In San Diego, a nurse held a sign that read simply: Help Students Find Affordable Housing.” In Waterville, Maine, California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee Co-President Cokie Giles held a sign that read “Health Care for All” and “Good Jobs;” In Walnut Creek, nurses held signs that read: “Water for All” “Help Veterans” and “Help the Homeless..” Massachusetts nurses joined with activists from Progressive Democrats of America to hold a vigil in the Springfield, office of Rep. Richard Neal, and Michigan RNs rallied with their allies in Ypsilanti and met with staff of Rep. Debbie Dingell urging her to support HR 1464.

Students in San Jose support Robin

“Inequality in health, rampant hunger, homelessness and poverty continue to devastate far too many families,” said Registered Nurse Deborah Burger, an NNU co-president. “The climate crisis puts our planet at risk and is rapidly accelerating extreme weather events, droughts, and epidemics that threaten public health. We need the Robin Hood Tax, best embodied in Rep. Ellison’s bill, to raise the revenues we desperately need to protect our health, our families, our communities, and our nation,”

Vegas vigil

While most Americans pay as much as a 7 percent tax on everything from shoes, to appliances to automobiles, Wall Street currently pays no tax on stock trades, derivatives and other speculative instruments. With its relatively small surcharge, the Inclusive Property Act would exempt households with adjusted gross incomes under $75,000; nor would the fee apply to ordinary consumer activity, such as credit card or ATM transactions, checking accounts, personal loans or tax free municipal bonds.

PDA joined Robin in Massachusetts

Recently, we started a regular item featuring the life and nursing career stories of Kay McVay, a longtime intensive care unit RN at Kaiser Permanente and president emeritus of the California Nurses Association. In our last installment, she was explaining how the association, before leadership was taken over by staff nurses in 1993, looked down upon and ignored the concerns of RNs who worked at the bedside. She had just called CNA about a work problem and been given the brush off.

So what did you do then?

It wasn’t just me. Some Kaiser nurses were already working on this problem. I got this call and they asked me if I was happy with the new contract, and I said no. They said, “Well, we’re going to meet on Thursday down at the Lung Association in Oakland. Can you be there?” Sure, I said. So I started going, and in 1983, that turned into our group, RNs for Quality Care. And Martha Kuhl, who worked at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, had a group called SNAP, the Staff Nurse Action Project. We’d all been trying to figure out how we could change CNA to be more involved with the nurses. I think about 95 percent of CNA’s funds came from staff nurses, but they spent maybe 10 percent on us. We were the “Four K’s”: There was Kit Costello, Martha Kuhl, Marilynne Kenefick, and myself, Kay McVay.

We started going to their board meetings, and they were blown away that we would be at their meetings, because they’d never had anybody come before. There’s wasn’t a staff nurse on that board, believe me. So they decided, “Well, we’ll take care of that,” and they started holding their meetings down in Southern California. Well, it was very interesting. There were several of us who managed to get on a plane and go down to San Diego or to L.A. or wherever it was, and we’d be there. It was out of our own pocket.

Wow, that’s determination. How did they respond to that?

When we still showed up, they started having these special meetings that they would have before the board meeting so that all the decisions and discussions had already taken place before they’d come into the board meeting.

So trying to participate in their meetings didn’t seem to work.

We were trying our very best to work within the system, and we did what we could do. So then we thought, we need to get at least one staff nurse on their board. Maybe if we got one, they’d listen to whoever it was, and we could get a little more done.

Did you manage to elect someone?

It took a couple of tries, but we finally got one person, Marilynne Kenefick, on the board. And they would not call on her to let her speak and her vote just did not count.

So what did you all do next?

Well, in the 1990s, CNA did this brilliant thing. They hired this woman down in Southern California by the name of RoseAnn DeMoro and brought her up to be the staff person in charge of the Economic and General Welfare division. The first time I met her, Children’s was out on strike and I went to the picket line to give them support, and we ended up having a conversation, and I came home, and I told my husband Richard, “My God, you know, this is the first time I’ve ever talked to anybody that actually understands what unions are about.”

And what are unions about?

Well, to understand what the problems are, what needs to be done to recognize the working person, to support the working person to be able to express themselves and to protect themselves. To understand the relationship between employers and employees, to help people understand what it means to be working class, that it’s okay, and that working class people together have the power and right to improve their lives.

Check back next issue to learn how the bedside nurses fought back and won leadership of their union.

“Hospitals say they are doing enough to protect nurses from violence, but they don’t have a plan,” said California Nurses Association Co-president Melinda Markowitz, RN.

 

Markowitz kicked off a press conference Wednesday in front of the Harris State Building, where over 50 RNs gathered for the final public hearing on new California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) hospital workplace violence regulations. The nurses were there to show continued support for the regulations, as they move toward finalization in 2016, and to advocate—along the way—for the highest level of protections.

“Hospitals chronically understaff the facilities, which leaves nurses vulnerable to violence. That’s unacceptable, and that’s going to change,” Markowitz emphasized.

The upcoming regulations are the result of a CNA-sponsored bill, SB 1299—the Healthcare Workplace Violence Prevention Act—which was signed in 2014 by California Governor Jerry Brown. The bill mandates that hospitals have a comprehensive workplace violence prevention plan; Cal/OSHA’s regulations will implement the law.

After the rally, RNs filed into the Harris State Building, in a show of support during the public hearing itself. Several CNA nurses opened the meeting with personal testimony.

 

“Not once in the years that I’ve worked at California Pacific Medical Center have we been offered any adequate training on recognizing potential violent situations—or on demonstrating and practicing techniques to diffuse, deescalate or manage these all–too-common occurrences,” said Amy Erb, RN. “The culture in our workplace is one of complacency and indifference by management and administration. So we are here to show support for the strongest regulations that would hold hospitals and other healthcare facilities accountable for implementing a violence prevention plan.”

Mike Hill, RN, of Sutter Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, also spoke at the hearing. Sharing a personal account of violence in his facility, he explained that after a physical altercation between two families in the neonatal intensive care unit, a lack of staffing and adequate protocols caused a dangerous delay in addressing the violence.

“Despite security being called, the nurses and doctors had to break up the altercation. Police also had to be called because there were not enough security staff available,” said Hill. “This has become the norm, as nurses feel they are on their own in fighting this violence. These regulations emphasize prevention, which is the key.”

RNs cite the prevention aspect of California’s current legislation as a model for the nation.

 

“These draft regulations set a model for the rest of the country by emphasizing prevention. Some states emphasize criminalizing perpetrators, who are often mentally unstable patients, but we don’t believe locking up more mentally ill people is the answer,” says Markowitz. “It is the responsibility of hospitals to stop violence from happening in the first place.”

Nurses also laud the comprehensive nature of the proposed regulations, which cover healthcare workers working in any location where healthcare is being provided, including retail settings and out in the community-at-large (in the case of public health nurses).

With final input gathered, draft regulations will then move on toward finalization in 2016.

See Complete Picture Set Here

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We believe that it is going to be the nurses, the RNs, who will lead the change in healthcare.” – Kay McVay, RN, President Emeritus, California Nurses Association

Year 15 of the new millennium opened with a most momentous achievement for registered nurses and patients – a precedent-setting agreement in the largest RN contract in the nation, for 18,000 Kaiser Permanente RNs and NPs that will likely raise the bar for nurses from coast to coast.

The new pact could not have been realized without the unified determination of Kaiser nurses, with the broad support of other RNs and our unparalleled organization, to defend the role of nurses and their professional expertise as patient advocates.

Their unity and devotion to assuring the highest level of quality care for patients as well as protections for the nurses who deliver that care produced a historic agreement that will result in hundreds of additional RNs providing care for patients, not just in the clinics and home, but in the hospitals as well with a significant impact on the quality of care. 

It means an agreement that features landmark new security for nurses on the job, with supplemental insurance, for RNs exposed to workplace violence, deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, and needle-stick injuries. And it includes a significant, well-earned, pay increase, stricter limits on travelers, and maintenance of the critical pension plan for nurses to look forward to be able to retire with dignity and in health.

Yet, the new pact cannot be understood just in the months of rallies, marches, and struggles by Kaiser RNs. It is also a reminder of the traditions and efforts of Kaiser RNs like Kay McVay and CNA over many years, and a historical memory lodged in the offices of Kaiser and other hospital executives as well as our nurses.

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday,” wrote Pearl Buck, or, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.”

Kaiser RNs have long been in the forefront of standing up for their patients and themselves, setting a benchmark that others have followed.

To understand the victory of Kaiser nurses today, a good place to start is the 14-month fight with a more entrenched Kaiser management of the 1990s that sought to push through multiple contract reduction demands and refused to respond to RN concerns about patient care standards.

The Kaiser RNs well understood that their response would rebound through other hospitals. As Kaiser RN Zenei Cortez, now a CNA-co-president, noted later, “We needed to fight not only for all the Kaiser nurses, but for all the RNs in the United States.”

And fight they did, with six short-term, unified, strikes, with a vision that the nurses and their organization would not allow the role of the registered nurse to be compromised.

Throughout the battle, nurses had to withstand a unified healthcare industry, their union partners who signed the infamous labor-management partnership on the day of the first strike, and an often-hostile press.

But we had a significant ally, as Kaiser RN, now CNA and NNU co-president Deborah Burger noted afterward. “The strikes galvanized not only the nurses, but the public and the patients. Each time we came back, there was even more support.”

Through that long fight, Kaiser and the hospital industry as a whole learned a valuable lesson. The Kaiser RNs, and the leadership and staff of the organization, would not break.

It ended with a stellar attainment, as the New York Times noted in a national article headlined, “Nurses Get New Role in Patient Protection. Pact with Biggest H.M.O. Allows Care Givers to Guard Standards.”

A key component was the establishment of an unprecedented provision in which Kaiser agreed to the establishment of 18 quality liaisons, selected by the nurses themselves, to meet with management to address and resolve patient care concerns, as well as protection of the RNs’ contract standards achieved over years of effort.

As Robert Kuttner wrote in the Boston Globe at the time, “Unions do best, not just as self-interested workers with their hands out but as a broader social conscience on behalf of vulnerable people. Indeed, if labor fails to play this role, it is just another interest group, and it loses public support.”

That is the legacy that is a foundation of our latest achievement with Kaiser and our continued success in fighting for all nurses, patients, and the public interest. It is a legacy, and model, our organization will never forget.