Sarah Solon
Shoddy Labor Decision Disproportionately Affects Women
More than 40% of nurses are dissatisfied with their jobs - for reasons ranging from chronic stress due to understaffing to verbal abuse in the workplace to less than adequate compensation.
Yesterday, "in a decision condemned by unions but praised by business," nurses were handed one more reason to be dissatisfied with their jobs. Re-shaping a profession that's already without many real opportunities for advancement (another cause of job disapproval), "the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling yesterday that will exempt registered nurses - and many other workers - from union membership if they have certain kinds of supervisory duties." (Quotes from the NYTimes)
Omitting any sort of fanfare and getting right to the point: unions are good for nurses, and the new "supervisory" category is a dramatically different, dangerous, and unprecedented interpretation of past labor definitions that could affect up to 8 million registered nurses, some of whom perform charge nurse duties as little as 10-15% of the time. While charge nurses may decide which patients others will see (and are thus supervisory), they do not have say in hospital policy or in other management decisions, and have no say in the conditions of their own work - and will have even less under this new ruling that strips them of their right to organize.
The biting dissent issued by the two Democrats on the labor board, Wilma B. Liebman and Dennis P. Walsh, says it best: "Today's decision threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees."
While the decision will impact workers in other industires, let's just focus on nurses.
When I say "unions are good for nurses," here's what I mean: unionized nurses and charge nurses make around 13% more than non-unionized nurses, union contracts mandate safety in the workplace, union contracts mandate lower nurse-to-patient ratios which have been shown to greatly increase patient care, union contracts increase pay and increased pay has been shown to ameliorate the nursing crisis at certain hospitals that have raised their nursing compensation packages...the list goes on and on.
The kicker with union contracts and nurses is that 92.3% of nurses are women. Of these nurses, "72% of nurses don't feel safe from assault in their workplace, up to 95% of nurses reported having been bullied at work, and up to 75% of nurses reported having been subjected to sexual harassment at work." 35% of nurses who participated in a given study left their jobs because of verbal abuse from a physician - the primary cause of the bullying and harassment of nurses at work. And let's remember that nurses work in hospitals and other health-care facilities - where their patients long-term health, in not their life, is on the line. Given the huge importance of the tasks nurses must accomplish during their shifts, it's completely unacceptable that "at least 70 percent said blowups with physicians [the most common form of verbal abuse of nurses] increases errors, and nearly as many said it decreases productivity on the job."
The workplace horrors of harassment and bullying are far too prevalent among nurses, and union contracts include provisions for protection from these abuses, many of which are only exacerbated by gender issues. United American Nurses contracts, for example, "put nurses on safety and health committees and purchasing committees, giving nurses an equal say in safety policy and requiring hospitals to buy the safest products available. Contracts commit employers to measures that prevent violence and enforce zero-tolerance on hostile, abusive or disrespectful behavior - from anyone." And in one of their specific contracts, "Nurses at Fairview Hospitals in Minnesota ratified language requiring the hospitals to prevent violence and verbal abuse through patient risk assessments, an annual course on de-escalation, behavior management, physical protection and a trained response team."
The category of "supervisor" is, plainly put, bunk. UAN President Cheryl Johnson, an RN, made the same point at the Center for American Progress Forum:
"One tenth of us are registered nurses - [and under the new ruling] 843,000 of us could be reclassified as supervisors and denied union representation.About 1.4 million RNs work in hospitals as staff nurses. We're the ones who care for patients day-in, day-out, 24-7. Do you think for one minute that 843,000 of those nurses are supervisors? That's more than half of us - a supervisory ratio of more than one-to-one. Do you think for a minute that hospitals actually would have that many supervisors?
I may find that I've been assigned charge nurse duties [a specific] day. This is not a position I apply for, nor one I have every day. It's assigned by a nursing supervisor. I may not even know I'm the charge nurse for my shift until I get to work."
And yet, if a nurse is assigned to enough days as a charge nurse (only 10-15% of her time at work), she can lose her right to organize. The new "supervisor" category will do little to delineate who has managerial power and privilege and who doesn't, and will instead enforce a widespread disincentive for any sort of workplace leadership of the part of nurses, if not create a disincentive to enter or stay in the profession at all.
And frankly, we can't do without nurses. We're already in the middle of a nursing shortage - which is greatly impacting health care outcomes and quality. According to Nursingworld.com:
"A study on the nursing shortage by Linda Aiken of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing found that an estimated 20,000 people die each year because they have checked into a hospital with overworked nurses. The study also found that Americans scheduled for routine surgeries run a 31 percent greater risk of dying if they are admitted to a hospital with a severe shortage of nurses. That's approximately one-fifth of the up to 98,000 deaths that occur each year as a result of medical errors. Nurses in the study cared for an average of four patients at a time, with the risk of death increasing by about 7 percent for each additional patient cared for over that baseline number. (Source: "Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality, Nurse Burnout, and Job Dissatisfaction," study: see Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct. 23-30, 2002.)"
As I said before, union contracts mandate lower patient-to-nurse ratios, which this study among others has proven lead to better health care outcomes.
To keep up with our country's health care needs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that registered nurses will need to fill "the second largest number of new jobs among all occupations between 2004 and 2014, increasing by 29.4 percent." In a job sector in which 1 in 3 nurses under 30 claims that they will leave the profession in the next year, stripping charge nurses of the right of unionize is just one more disincentive to enter the profession in the first place.
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The AFL-CIO, Spewing Forth, and Nathan Newman have had great posts on this rule change.
I have also written about this changes, when they were pending:
"Kentucky River," a pending decision of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), would among other things forcefully promote nurses to "supervisors" with one aim in mind: by making these nurses management, they will be performing the same tasks, but will no longer be defined as laborers, and will thus lose their right to union organization. The AFL-CIO blog spells out the twisted logic behind this move.Weighing in on this same topic with his always clear and cogent conservative analysis, Steven Colbert offers this wisdom: "It's time that labor and management come together as management to exploit labor."
Sarah Solon: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 10:20 AM, Oct 05, 2006 in
Labor
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