Pa. nurses to join with national labor group

[pickledpepperRN]

Pa. nurses to join with national labor group

By Harold Brubaker

A Pennsylvania nurse's union with 5,100 members, mostly in the Philadelphia area, said it is affiliating with a powerful and deep-pocketed national counterpart.

The move puts the financially struggling Temple University Health System and other hospitals in the region on notice the nurses' union will take a firmer stance against staffing cutbacks.

The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals, independent since its founding in 2000, plans to announce details this afternoon of the alliance, which will encompass 80,000 members. The group it is joining forces with is the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee....

...The Pennsylvania group represents nurses at 14 hospitals in the state, including those at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, Crozer Chester Medical Center in Chester, and Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, spokeswoman Kathleen Casey said....

http://www.philly.com/philly/jobs/20080110_Pa__nurses_to_join_with_national_labor_group.html

[oramar]

I always said I did not think they could stand on their own for long. You just have to be big to have clout these days.

[NRSKarenRN, BSN, RN]

The Pennylvania union, known as PASNAP, typically spends 35 percent to 40 percent of its annual budget, or about $500,000, on organizing, said Bill Cruice, executive director of the union based in Conshohocken. Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California group, said the merger would enable PASNAP to increase the organizing budget by "what ever it takes," without being specific. "We have a considerable amount of more resources," she said

???? and where is this money coming from---union dues.

Several of the hospitals whose nurses are represented by PASNAP are in low-income areas where a large percentage of patients are on Medicaid or Medicare, putting them under severe financial pressure.

At Temple, for example, 78 percent of patients were on some form of government insurance in the year ended June 30. During that year, Temple cut 500 jobs and made other money-saving changes that helped it swing from a $20 million operating loss in fiscal 2006 to a $20 million profit in fiscal 2007.

Cruice disputed the suggestion that his union represented workers at hospitals that tended to be financially weak. "Hospitals represented by PASNAP sometimes do well and sometimes don't," he said. Cruice said the nurse's scale at Crozer Chester, for example, runs from $25 an hour to $46 an hour for a nurse with 25 years experience. At a non-union hospital, he said, the typical range is $25 to $38 an hour.

NONE of the hospitals PASNAP represents are bringing in big bucks. All are just breaking even. Can't get blood out of a stone and I don't see RN's in my area willing to contribute more $$ to dues.

Prior to PASNAP forming their union, they were part of PA Nurses Assoc (PSNA). Because of this my PSNA dues were over $800.00/year in 1990's....and I was not a union member. Today my PSNA dues are less than $300.00/year still higher than most allnurses members willing to shell out to have professional nursing advocacy at state and national level.

[Julia RN]

In most state associations that have unions, the union members pay a different rate of dues- sometimes twice as much as the non-union member. All nurses benefit from whatever is achieved in the union contracts.

Some of the states really depend on the union members to survive as so few nurses would join on their own. Don't you loose many members and political clout when the union becomes a separate structure from the state nurses association?

Was the dues structure in PA one of the reasons that the non-union members were willing to let the union leave?

[herring_RN, ASN, BSN]

PASNAP Update: http://www.pennanurses.org/news/newsletter/2008%20Update/February%202008%20Update.pdf

[Ludlow]

it is an honor and a joy to be united with the nurses from the great state of Pennsylvania!