[pickledpepperRN]

http://www.calnurse.org/?Action=Content&id=1090

Unions - California Nurses' Convention to Consider Whether to Seek Affiliation With AFL-CIO

Bureau of National Affairs
Thursday, August 25, 2005

The independent California Nurses Association is seriously considering seeking affiliation with the AFL-CIO, the union's president told BNA.

Delegates to the Sept. 22-23 convention of the 63,000-member California Nurses Association will be considering a resolution that would authorize the union's executive board to decide whether to seek affiliation with the AFL-CIO, CNA Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said in an Aug. 22 interview.
"The labor movement is under attack by the extreme right" and if "it dies, we die too," DeMoro told BNA. She added that CNA is doing "just fine," but it "can't be good in CNA if it is bad everywhere else."

DeMoro said that California workplaces have experienced a sharp escalation in attacks on workers and their unions, led by "well- funded corporations and a governor who promotes their agenda. Increasingly, the assault parallels and reflects the greatest corporate offensive against labor nationally in decades."
"We need to lend our name and our money to the fight against the corporate right," she added. ...

...UAN is affiliated with both the AFL-CIO and the American Nurses Association. CNA, which had been an affiliate of ANA, left the professional association in October 1995.
There has been bad blood between the two groups with UAN charging its bargaining units are under "attack" by CNA, which is trying to expand beyond California (19 LRW 405, 3/24/05) <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/LRW.NSF/ce3268e32dc318bd85256b57005c4cf3/9cab7dda812a752485256fce00005dea?OpenDocument> . Earlier this year, RNs in Cook County, Ill., voted to replace the UAN- affiliate, Illinois Nurses Association, their long-time bargaining agent, in favor of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, an affiliate of CNA (19 LRW 656, 5/19/05) <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/LRW.NSF/ce3268e32dc318bd85256b57005c4cf3/819fc2ad704c3a3c8525700500732eed?OpenDocument> .

AFL-CIO Would Attempt to Resolve Objections

AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt held open the possibility that CNA could apply and be granted a separate charter.
Hiatt told BNA Aug. 23 that the federation has never granted a single charter without at least one union objecting. He said objection of any union in the same jurisdiction is a "major consideration," but added that where the process "starts and ends is not necessarily the same." ...

DeMoro--whose union has sometimes competed with and sometimes worked jointly with the Service Employees International Union in California--criticized what she saw as a lack of real debate during the past year over the concerns that led to the disaffiliation of SEIU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers (19 LRW 991, 7/28/05 <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/LRW.NSF/ce3268e32dc318bd85256b57005c4cf3/60b6f69e7bea8d408525704b0081e00e?OpenDocument> ). She said that there were many issues that were not discussed within the labor movement and "this was a tremendous wasted opportunity."
According to DeMoro, there were no "real ideological disputes" between the disaffiliating unions and the other unions. She noted that the current leadership of the AFL-CIO and its programs were mostly put in place by those who challenged them. Presidents of the disaffiliating unions served on the AFL-CIO executive council as well as its committees for many years, DeMoro noted.
She also said that no workers or rank-and-file members were involved in the debate, no local or national forums were held, and no rank-and-file members voted....

...No issues affecting the majority of working Americans, such as the health care crisis and declining wages were discussed and no real solutions to those problems were proposed, DeMoro told BNA. Rather, the specific proposals the dissident unions offered were "structural and bureaucratic, not programmatic." There is no evidence that any of these changes, including rebating union dues, forcing unions to merge, or giving jurisdiction to unions by industry or sector based on its density in an area, would solve labor's problems, she added.