Employee Free Choice Act Passes House

The "Employee Free Choice Act" would remove your right to vote in a voting booth in private. Union organizers and employees supporting the union can surround you in the parking lot, corner you in the restroom or stare you down in the breakroom until you sign "the card". Peer pressure or mob pressure compels you for your safety to sign "the card". Is this the way important decisions should be made? With you "on stage" forced to make a decision that will affect your job, your future and your families future while everyone stops and watches?


We Save Your Life – Please Save Our Right to Vote!
Nurses and other caregivers work long hours, under great stress, all across the country. We make sacrifices for you, our patients, every day.
One sacrifice we shouldn’t have to make is giving up our right to vote.
Union bosses are spending $400 million in a campaign of deception to steal our right to vote, so they can reach into our paychecks and take our hard earned money.
The “Card Check Bill” passed by the US House of Representatives soon will be taken up by the US Senate. It would be used to deprive Nurses and other caregivers of the right they now enjoy under federal labor law: a right to a secret ballot election on whether to unionize.
If the union gets a majority of staff to sign union cards – even if by threats, misrepresentation, or mistake – the union gets in without a vote. Today, we can go and vote privately in a voting booth and in secret, according to our conscience without fear of retribution or retaliation. Only we know how we voted. This law – misnamed the “Employee Free Choice Act” or “EFCA”, by union bosses – would take that right away.
Once unionized, labor bosses can demand that we pay union dues – or get fired. They do that in most states today. If the union gets its way, by next year, nurses in all 50 states could be fired for not paying union dues – nurses who never got to vote!
Please support us in our fight to protect our right to vote in a secret ballot election. We work to save your lives – please work to help us save our rights. Call your Senator – or Senate candidate – and tell them to STOP the EFCA/”Card Check” bill.
I support the Nurses and other caregivers’ rights to a secret ballot election and oppose any effort by the US Senate to take that right away with EFCA.

You speak of cornered stare downs in parking lots and restrooms? "Mob pressure compels you for your safety"...to sign a union authorization card? This is an example of the tired, worn out anti-union consultant rhetoric that I've heard so many times. But, I have to ask, is that what compelled you to sign pro-union cards?

Seriously, Sherwood, we're nurses, right? We sign legal documents everyday. We collect data, analyze facts, synthesize information, make decisions, implement plans, and evaluate our hypothesis and assessments using the scientific method. We validate informed consent for a living. We call irritable surgeons in the middle of the night to report critical lab values, get orders, and sometimes just because a befuddled or angry patient or their family demands to speak to the doctor.

In my experience, nurses who organize and join a union are exercising their freedom of association rights. They want to act collectively to remove hostile administrative and corporate barriers to their ability to provide safe, therapeutic care for their patients. As a pro-active, pro-RN union organizer, nurses are intelligent and understand what they're signing when they agree to form a union to bargain collectively for better wages, hours, and working conditions. It shouldn't be any harder to form or join a union than signing up to join the Girl Scouts or become a member of a church or synagogue. Nurses are capable, professional decision makers, with finely tuned critical thinking skills.

Perhaps without realizing it, you may be selling your colleagues short, and paternalistically trivializing their intelligence. Nurses and other workers who want to unionize fear their employers' threats, both real and implied, that they will lose their jobs and benefits. The most "anti-union" nurses I know are usually married to someone in management, and, as the saying goes, "it's hard to get a man to understand something, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."

Money spent on union busters could be better spent on mentorship programs, better health benefits, and more staff to take care of patients. Just maybe the price of admission to a hospital and the cost to provide health care would be reduced if hospitals didn't keep some of the money it takes out of patients' pockets to use it against their nurses. EFCA will help insure that hospital revenues are not diverted for that purpose.

Wow, just like the current Republican administration, when you don't have a legitimate argument you resort to fear. As long as you don't corner me in the lady's bathroom, I think we're all independent enough to make up our own minds to join a union or not. Give Democracy a chance, Sherwood, you might like it.

I don't think the Employee Free Choice Act will make it past Bush without a veto proof majority, but it will become law next year.