Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee
April 20, 2021
Eastern Maine Medical Center RNs hold action to demand hospital employers put patients above profits - 1/27/21
Nurses at Maine’s largest unionized hospital have voted resoundingly to extend their current labor agreement for another two years, in exchange for major concessions from Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC), announced Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (MSNA/NNOC).
This contract makes improvements to staffing, including an agreement that EMMC management will make improvements to critical care departments that nurses have requested for the past three years.
“The pandemic has been incredibly difficult for all health care workers,” said MSNA President Cokie Giles, RN. “When our management approached us about extending our current contract, we saw an opportunity to make important changes that we have wanted for a long time.”
(Mario Tama / Getty)
A dozen years ago, I visited the Chicago offices of the National Nurses Organizing Committee on the city’s West Side. Visible through a large window was a gigantic parking garage, an annex to one of the equally huge hospitals clustered within a dozen blocks. Cook County, Mount Sinai, and three other medical complexes employed tens of thousands of workers. Among those seeking to organize them was an African American NNOC staffer.
Books in Review
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
By Gabriel Winant
She told me she was the daughter of an autoworker in Flint, Mich., who’d been a militant in his union during the heyday of the battles waged between the United Auto Workers and General Motors. In Flint, she became a radical activist, inspired by the power of the UAW and the moral energy of the civil rights movement, and in time made a career as a union organizer of nurses and other health care workers.
Democratic legislative leaders reprimand Maine Medical Center for union busting tactics
Sen. President Troy Jackson and Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau, with 75 other legislators, urged the hospital to fire the consultants pledged to support nurses Author: Roslyn Flaherty (NEWS CENTER Maine) Published: 1:25 PM EDT March 15, 2021 Updated: 11:12 AM EDT March 17, 2021
PORTLAND, Maine Maine’s Democratic legislative leaders wrote to Maine Medical Center (MMC) this weekend admonishing administration and “anti-union consultants” for allegedly strong-arming its nurses into voting down a proposed union.
The letter, from Senate President Troy Jackson and Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau, along with 75 other Senate and House members, asked the hospital to “fire the consultants and respect RNs federally-protected right to organize.”
(The Center Square) – A Corpus Christi, Texas-based nurse is challenging the dismissal of her case by the National Labor Relations Board s Acting General Counsel, Peter Ohr, who she alleges
CORPUS CHRISTI - Nurse Marissa Zamora has just filed an opposition brief defending her case charging National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) union bosses in her workplace with concealing a “neutrality agreement” struck in secret between union officials and HCA Holdings management that covers her hospital, according to a press release.
The brief was filed at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with free legal aid from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys.
Zamora’s case has progressed to the full NLRB in Washington, DC, after an NLRB Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) dismissed a complaint that then-NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb had issued prosecuting the NNOC for hiding the agreement. Though Zamora and Robb had both filed exceptions urging the full Board to reverse the ALJ’s decision, NLRB Acting General Counsel Peter Ohr filed a motion on February 23, 2021, seeking unilaterally to send the complaint back to the NLRB Fort Worth regional off