National Nurses United and Its Effect on Nursing

National Nurses United was founded in 2009 and has nearly 200,000 members today across the U.S. (it is the largest union of R.N.s) (Gordon, 2014). It has a "democratic governing structure consisting of an RN member, elected Board of Directors, all of whom are direct-care registered nurses and a presidency model called the Council of Presidents, which is a shared presidency of four RNs" (National Nurses United, 2016).

Individual rights within the union consist of the right to vote for directors and on issues impacting the union such as contracts, as is standard with the democratic governmental structure of the union.

The union has achieved a number of concessions in the few short years of its existence: by setting a one-day strike date for nurses at Appalachian Regional Hospital in Kentucky and Beckley Appalachian Regional Hospital in West Virginia, the union managed to induce the Regional hospitals to agree to no longer extend wage freezes, to establish better health coverage and reduce workloads from the then-current unsafe levels (Gordon, 2014). Areas of negotiation currently undertaken by the union are worker incentives, health coverage, retirement plans, workloads and wages.

The union does not partake in employer activities considered unfair labor practices in violation of Taft-Hartley, though its use of strikes has been effective and could be viewed as borderline jurisdictional (as in the cases of KY and WV).

Nonetheless what was gained by the union in its threat to strike in those two states was better worker compensation and workers' rights as well as better working conditions for nurses, who were overloaded in both hospitals, creating unsafe conditions both for themselves and for patients expecting to receive optimal care at the Regional hospital facilities.

Nothing was lost by the union, as it tackled the issues fairly and forcefully and achieved its objectives and also won a fair amount of respect from the public as a result of its hardnosed and hard fought battles with the Regional hospitals.

The Regional hospitals are currently viewed as better due to the presence of the union because they now take better care of their nurses, provide better benefits, and have mandatory guidelines in place to ensure that unsafe workloads do not arise and become a negative factor in the future. The workers in the hospitals are also better as they are more united thanks to the union and have obtained the concessions they wanted thanks to the methods employed by the union's leadership.

The major milestones of the process of unionization within National Nurses United consisted of organizing more than six thousand RNs among five different states in its first year alone; contributing to the shared experience collective bargaining campaigns in Washington, DC, as well as other locations; sponsoring federal legislation that supported reform for patient and nursing safety, such as safe RN-to-patient.