CNA: Creating Disunity Rather Than Building "One Voice"

While HPAE's 11,000 members have made significant gains in recent years, we continue to fight for improved staffing, quality patient care, and good wages and benefits. Unfortunately, our efforts are hampered by the lack of coordination and unity among health care unions in New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania. 

In New Jersey, HPAE is by far the largest union for health care professionals. However, six other unions represent nurses and ten unions represent hospital workers as a whole. There is virtually no coordination among those unions. Because health care unions are not working together with "One Voice," we are all failing to build the maximum strength to establish high standards of wages, benefits, and conditions. 

Given the need for coordination and unity, it is all the more unfortunate that another union - based in California - has expanded its operations to New Jersey. The California Nurses Association (CNA) is attempting to recruit Registered Nurses in New Jersey to a new group they created, the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC). 

The CNA/NNOC's efforts are counterproductive because they will cause more destructive competition among health care unions. In a January 3rd letter to Deborah Burger, President of CNA, Ann Twomey, President of HPAE, urged CNA to reconsider their approach. Ann wrote, 

“HPAE was founded more than 30 years ago by RNs at one hospital, beginning as an independent union of 250 RNs and LPNs. Despite our size, we were the first group of nurses to strike in NJ, winning that strike and a great new contract. From there, nurses at other hospitals reached out to us to help them organize. Within three years, we had tripled our size…. Today, we represent over 11,000 nurses and health professionals in hospitals and healthcare facilities, primarily in New Jersey, but also in Philadelphia. 

We have dedicated large resources to helping RNs and other health professionals to organize, and have established a record of success of which we are quite proud.

We have also established an effective legislative and political program. Using our collective voices effectively in both our wn hospitals and in the Statehouse and Legislature, we have accomplished much, including the strongest ban on mandatory overtime in the nation and a bill requiring hospitals to provide patients and the public with disclosure on nurse-to-patient staffing levels. 

We didn't do this alone. HPAE believes firmly in working in coalition with other unions, nursing associations and community groups to achieve our goals - including the NJ State Nurses Association, several other unions (AFSCME, CWA, SEIU, IUOE) and NJ Citizen Action, Consumers for Civil Justice and retiree groups. Bringing our collective strength of all of these groups together is an important principle in uniting campaigns on working conditions and the quality of patient care.

Instead of seeking to divide us by attacking existing unions, we invite you to work with us as we strive to use our strength, resources and creativity to tackle the real enemies - the corporate health care interests who have broken our health care system.” 

Our challenge remains: we must continue to build a strong, "One Voice" for health care professionals.

BEWARE: CALIFORNIA NURSES COME TO NEW JERSEY TO BREAK UNIONS

California Nurses Association (CNA) is an independent union of RNs that broke away from the American Nurses Association several years ago. They make it known that they would like all State Nurses Associations to break away from the ANA and join them. Some have, including the associations in Maine and Massachusetts. Together they call themselves the American Association of Registered Nurses. AARN is a more of a coalition than an organization as there are no officers, structure, services or dues. But other State Nurses Associations rejected their efforts, such as Hawaii Nurses Association just this past year. 

Recently, CNA launched a new effort called the National Nurses Organizing Committee. They have sent out brochures to RNs in several states, presumably after obtaining lists from the State Licensing Boards. Many nurses in HPAE received the brochures. 

They appear to be targeting nurses who are already organized in other unions. The union lingo for this is "raiding". Raiding another union to get their members is prohibited in the AFL-CIO, the national labor organization with whom HPAE is affiliated. However, the California Nurses Association is not part of the AFL-CIO, so their actions, as detrimental as they might be, are outside of the scope of decent union principles and conduct.