Nurses at Plymouth care center go union

February 26, 2014 by

mna-logo3-300x300Registered nurses at WestHealth Emergency Department and Urgent Care voted Feb. 13 in favor of joining the Minnesota Nurses Association, a health care facility based in Plymouth and operated by Abbott Northwestern.

In the unit of 32 nurses, 92 percent voted in favor of joining MNA in balloting conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.

Many nurses at the new Plymouth care center had been members of MNA at other health care facilities, and according to the union, “they were eager for the same opportunity to have a voice in their workplace to be able to advocate for themselves and their patients.”

MNA President Linda Hamilton welcomed the Abbott Northwestern-WestHealth nurses to the union.

“We are all stronger and patients benefit because our voice continues to grow,” said Hamilton.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Allina stonewalls Hastings nurses as contract talks continue

January 28, 2014 by
Nurses picket outside Regina Medical Center in advance of contract negotiations. (photo courtesy MNA)

Nurses picket outside Regina Medical Center in advance of contract negotiations. (photo courtesy MNA)

Negotiations on a new contract are dragging into the new year, but nurses at Regina Medical Center in Hastings, members of the Minnesota Nurses Association, continue to resist Allina Health’s effort to treat them differently than nurses in every other Allina hospital in the Twin Cities Metro Area.

The two sides returned to the bargaining table Jan. 24, but according to the MNA, Allina continued to insist on excluding Regina nurses from pension and health benefits extended to MNA members at other Allina facilities in the area.

Nurses say the disparity would have alarming implications for the level of nursing care Regina provides to the Hastings community.

“Their second-rate offers are an insult to nursing, nurses and, most all, this community,” Jane Traynor, a Regina nurse and chair of the MNA bargaining team, said after the negotiations broke down.

“We offered significant movement,” Traynor added. “We gave them a path to an honorable settlement, and they walked away.”

Regina nurses’ previous contract expired with the 2013 calendar year. This is the first contract Regina nurses have attempted to bargain since Allina purchased Regina last year.

The nurses received an outpouring of support from the community Jan. 21, when they staged informational picketing outside the hospital. Colleagues within the Allina system plan to stage a solidarity picket Feb. 14 outside Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

“This affects all of us, so make no mistake, we will stand by each other,” Diane Johnson, an Abbott Northwestern nurse, said. “We will make every nurse, every resource available to our colleagues in Hastings to stand up against corporate health care’s impact on our communities.”

Hastings nurses said they remain open to continued negotiations with Allina, and they requested additional bargaining dates with a federal mediator. Allina Health did not immediately respond to the request.

“We want to focus on our patients,” Traynor said. “We want a contract that respects our skills and our contributions to patient care in Hastings.”

Filed Under: Organizing, Union Events Tagged With: , , , , ,

Hastings nurses plan vigil as talks with Allina stall

December 23, 2013 by

mna-logo3-300x300Nurses at Regina Medical Center in Hastings will hold a candlelight vigil tonight, keeping hope alive for a new contract with the hospital that retains the level of nursing care the Hastings community expects.

The vigil will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the parking lot at the intersection of Highways 55 and 61. Nurses also will collect contributions of money, non-perishable food or clothing for Hastings Family Service at the event.

The current contract between Regina nurses, who are members of the Minnesota Nurses Association, and the hospital will expire Dec. 31.

This is the first contract Regina nurses have attempted to bargain since Allina Health purchased Regina earlier this year, and nurses have bristled at disparities between the contract Allina is offering them and contracts at other Allina facilities in the Twin Cities Metro Area.

“I think they want to get us on the cheap,” said Jane Traynor, a Regina nurse and chair of the MNA bargaining team. “It’s an inferior offer, and we’re not second-rate nurses at Regina.”

MNA and hospital systems, including Allina, operate a joint pension plan for nurses in the seven-county Metro Area, which includes Hastings. MNA members at Allina facilities in the Metro Area also have the option of enrolling in the union’s health-insurance plan, rather than accepting Allina’s corporate plan.

Those are benefits Allina extended to nurses after taking over hospitals in Buffalo, Cambridge and River Falls, Wis., Traynor said. But Allina has so far refused to extend the same benefits to Regina nurses during ongoing contract negotiations.

Traynor, who has worked at Regina for 21 years, said she worries that if Regina nurses accept a second-rate contract, it will create a second-rate level of care for residents of the Hastings area.

“The pension and health insurance nurses have in the Metro is an excellent recruitment and retention tool to keep qualified nurses,” she said. “Because we’re so close to the Metro in Hastings, the qualified people we have, they won’t stay, and Allina won’t be able to recruit qualified people to take care of our patients here in the community.”

For that reason, Traynor said she expects to see plenty of community members at tonight’s vigil.

“Allina has made commitments to the community of Hastings,” she said. “They’ve talked about expanding services, providing more specialists, a new clinic and rebuilding our emergency department.

“If they consider the Regina nurses second rate and inferior, I question their commitment to following through on those commitments to the community.”

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

HealthEast drags out negotiations with home-care nurses

July 15, 2013 by

mna-logo3-300x300HealthEast is dragging out negotiations on a first contract for nurses in its Home Care division, according to the Minnesota Nurses Association, which is seeking the public’s help in pressuring HealthEast to bargain in good faith.

The MNA, which represents about 65 nurses at HealthEast Home Care, is asking supporters to call or e-mail HealthEast CEO Kathryn Correia (651-232-2300, kgcorreia@healtheast.org) or Director of Labor Relations Mark Sorenson (651-232-5060, msorenson@healtheast.org).

The message, MNA representative Julia Stewart said, is simple: “Quit stalling and give these nurses a contract that’s fair.”

HealthEast Home Care nurses voted to form a union with MNA in April 2010. A year ago they reaffirmed that choice, voting down an attempt to decertify their union.

Despite nurses’ commitment to collective bargaining, HealthEast management has “steadfastly refused even the most typical and basic contract provisions,” Stewart said. That includes language requiring just cause for firing a nurse, and a grievance procedure ending with neutral arbitration.

In an attempt to jump-start negotiations, nurses recently offered to compromise on “several issues fundamental to their day-to-day work life,” like scheduling and workload, Stewart said. Management rejected the offer.

The two sides are meeting with a federal mediator.

By dragging out negotiations on a first contract, HealthEast is taking a page straight out of the playbook for union avoidance – and demonstrating the need for tougher labor laws. A 2009 study by Cornell University Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner found 52 percent of U.S. workers who succeeded at forming a union remained without a contract one year after their organizing election. Thirty-seven percent still lacked a contract two years after the election.

Employers face no penalty for failing to negotiate a first contract with newly organized workers. Many drag their feet as a result, hoping the longer workers wait to see results from their new union, the more likely they are to support a decertification vote – like the one MNA members fought off at HealthEast Home Care a year ago.

Management’s lethargic approach to negotiations with the new unit of home-care nurses stands in telling contrast to the HealthEast’s most recent round of negotiations with nurses at its Twin Cities hospitals, like St. Joseph’s, St. John’s and Bethesda.

Bargaining alongside other area hospital systems, HealthEast reached a three-year contract with MNA members – and did so about six months ahead of schedule. Hospital executives, Stewart said, emphasized during the negotiations that they wanted to achieve labor peace.

“This doesn’t feel like labor peace to me,” she said.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , ,

Walter Frederickson: A tax for the people, not on the people

August 1, 2012 by

Walter Frederickson, R.N.

Earlier this spring, I stood on the steamy streets of Chicago and witnessed a revival that my union brothers and sisters in the Windy City said was a long time coming. I’d been swept into town a day earlier along with hundreds of nurses, union members and others to help National Nurses United (of which MNA is a founding member) launch what quickly became a national movement – the call for a “Robin Hood Tax” on the “Too Big to Fail” banks and Wall Street speculators who created this financial nightmare.

NNU put on a visual spectacle that afternoon, one that included hundreds of nurses dressed in bright red scrub tops, green masks and the type of pointy hats everyone associates with Robin Hood. Dozens of nationally-recognized speakers and musicians took the stage to share their support, and my union friends in Chicago told me it had been far too long since the city had seen this type of peaceful, public protest filling its streets. While I like to think our colorful costumes and pointy hats had something to do with the energy and passion that was unleashed in and around Daley Plaza, the reality is this: People of all stripes are ready to embrace an idea whose time has come.

It’s a simple concept: Putting a small “Financial Trans-action Tax” of less than one-half of one percent on the types of speculative Wall Street financial transactions that created the global economic crisis we’re still trying to recover from.

A simple idea, sure, but one that carries the support of a powerful and diverse group of people, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Nobel Prize-winning economists and thought leaders, religious entities and faith leaders, politicians and many more – from nurses to firefighters to AIDS activists to environmentalists to small business owners.

In the U.S., the Robin Hood Tax has the power to raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year. It can provide funding for jobs and put our union brothers and sisters back to work. It can kick start the economy and get us back on our feet. It can provide education, health care and financial support for the least among us by funding social safety net programs. And that’s just for starters!

Best of all, the Robin Hood Tax won’t affect ordinary Americans. It won’t touch our personal savings or other everyday consumer activity such as ATM withdrawals or our use of debit cards. It’s easy to enforce and tough to evade.

This is a tax on Wall Street, which created the greatest economic crisis in our nation since the Great Depression. These are the same people who have returned to record profits and bonuses while ordinary Americans, the 99 percent, continue to pay the price of the 1 percent’s self-created financial meltdown. The Robin Hood Tax is not a tax on the people. Rather, it is a tax for the people.

Take a minute to learn more at www.RobinHoodTax.org. And if you want to don a pointy hat, wear a green mask and take to the streets to let people know about this growing movement, know this – I’m with you!

– Walter Frederickson, RN, is executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, a union of 20,000 nursing professionals.

Filed Under: Labor Voices Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nurses call for ‘Robin Hood Tax’ on Wall Street transactions

June 19, 2012 by

Registered nurses Elayne Best (left) and Carol Diemert join the call for a “Robin Hood Tax” outside J.P. Morgan’s Minneapolis offices.

Dressed as modern-day members of the band of Merry Men, union nurses fanned out across downtown Minneapolis today, doling out bottles of water and a prescription for healing what ails the American economy.

The nurses’ solution? A “Robin Hood Tax” on Wall Street transactions.

The plan would place a small sales tax – less than half of 1 percent – on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives and currencies. Revenues would help reverse declining public support for schools, health care and infrastructure repair and development – and put an estimated 9 million Americans back to work.

Linda Hamilton, president of the 20,000-member Minnesota Nurses Association, called it a “tax for the people, not on the people.”

Hamilton’s union organized the Robin Hood-themed demonstration – many nurses wore pointed, green hats and masks – to coincide with similar actions in 15 other U.S. cities.

The MNA and its parent union, National Nurses United, began calling on lawmakers to “take from Wall Street and give to Main Street” last year. Since then they have been joined by dozens of other public-health, civic and advocacy organizations, as well as prominent economists and celebrities.

The Robin Hood Tax is aimed at high-volume trading, which today makes up a majority of all trades. Experts say the tax will help place limits on the reckless short-term speculation that threatens financial stability.

“Wall Street’s reckless speculation and risky deals caused our economy’s most devastating crash since the Great Depression, forcing millions of Americans to lose their jobs, their homes and their pensions,” said Jean Ross, a MNA member and co-president of NNU. “Three years later, Americans on Main Street still struggle to recover from a crisis we didn’t create. This is the way to start to turn it around.”

In Minneapolis, nurses rallied outside the offices of J.P. Morgan Chase, the financial giant that recently announced it had lost more than $2 billion by gambling on credit derivatives.

MNA staff representative Linda Lange and registered nurse Bob Michaelson hand out water and fliers downtown Minneapolis.

It is that type of risky behavior, MNA member Bob Michaelson said, that a “Robin Hood Tax” would help curtail. A former accountant, Michaelson switched careers 10 years ago. He entered the medical field and has worked as a registered nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis for the last year.

When he saw his union’s plan for combating Wall Street greed, Michaelson, who calls himself a “recovering corporate tax accountant,” knew he had to get involved.

“The ‘Robin Hood Tax’ makes sense because of the volume of transactions that we have on Wall Street that do not generate income for the common good,” Michaelson said. “It’s the Wall Street banking firms that profit from all these trades.”

Nurses don’t need a background in economics to know the U.S. economy isn’t working for middle class families, Michaelson added. After all, Robin Hood didn’t have his MBA.

“Nurses are concerned about the daily lives of everybody,” Michaelson said. “People look to us for good judgment on things.”

MNA President Hamilton put it this way: “People are suffering, and nurses take care of people. Nurses are coming up with solutions.”

For more information on the “Robin Hood Tax,” go to www.robinhoodtax.org.

Filed Under: Politics, Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
«Previous Page