by sue allen, rn at springfield regional medical center-fountain st. campus
i keep hoping that i will wake up to find this was all a bad dream. how can it be that everything my colleagues and i spent years trying to achieve here in springfield was suddenly destroyed by the underhanded actions of an out-of-state organization?
in my 33 years as a registered nurse, i have never experienced anything so personally or professionally devastating.
those of us who work at mercy and community hospitals had been looking forward to the day when we could finally vote on whether to form a union. many of us felt that joining together in seiu would make us better advocates for our patients and our community. in any event, it was our decision to make, and ours alone. thanks to all of our letters to hospital officials, meetings with elected leaders and appeals to the community for support, we had won ground rules that would allow us to make up our own minds.
so you can imagine our dismay when a swarm of organizers from the california nurses association arrived with their shocking allegations. i personally have met other registered nurses who are represented by seiu, and i know for a fact there isn't a shred of truth to what the cna is saying. but the cna so confused the situation with their angry rhetoric and distortions that it simply was not possible to proceed with a fair election.
i don't know why an organization that calls itself a "union" would do what the california nurses association did. apparently they have done this many times before in other states. here's what i do know: everything we worked for these last three years was sabotaged by an out-of-state organization that doesn't care about us, the people who live and work in springfield.
this california group doesn't know anything about what we've been through. it doesn't know how difficult it has been to adjust to the merger of our hospitals, not just for the registered nurses, but for the whole team. they don't understand how much we wanted the opportunity to speak with one voice and work together to make our new hospital the best it can be.
it doesn't realize how insulting it is to characterize the ground rules we fought so hard to win as some kind of back-room deal. or how arrogant it is for them to decide that we would be better off with no union than to be part of the union we chose.
seiu is the union we've been working with for years, the union that has stood by us through thick and thin, and the union that (unlike the cna) represents nurses and other hospital employees in ohio — including at our sister hospitals in catholic healthcare partners.
frankly, i don't believe the california nurses association shares our values. if it did, it would have known how offended we were by its hostile tone, condescending attitude and disruptive actions in our hospitals while we were trying to take care of our patients.
it's time for the cna to go back to where it came from. only then can we wake up from this nightmare, heal the wounds and realize our dream of having the opportunity to freely choose whether to join together in a union.
sue allen is a registered nurse who has worked at mercy medical center, now springfield regional medical center-fountain st. campus, for 30 years.
