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There are a lot of down feelings today over the Bessemer Amazon campaign so I'm going to start a thread about the victory of the 1800 nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina as organized by my union @NationalNurses and @SWA_solidarity: 1/n https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/north-carolina-union-mission-hospital-nurses
Mission hospital employs 1800 nurses in Asherville, North Carolina, a state with the 2nd lowest union density in the United States at 2.3%. It was purchased by a multi billion dollar Tennessee based healthcare conglomerate called HCA Healthcare in February 2019 2/n
When the purchase went through nurses immediately began feeling pressure to “do more with less” a common refrain from hospital management, nurses being forces to work through lunch breaks and minimize trips to the bathroom while patient care suffered 3/n https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/06/north-carolina-nurses-stand-brink-historic-labor-victory
Union membership is so low in North Carolina that nurses in the campaign had no experience with them outside of what they had seen in movies, but that didn’t stop them from organizing to get 70% of their coworkers to sign cards to vote yes for the union after a year of organizing
Despite that commitment, HCA healthcare filed with the Trump NLRB to delay the election due to COVID in march of 2020, but they then turned around and used CARES act funds to pay for union busting firms to fight the campaign https://theintercept.com/2020/05/06/coronavirus-hca-healthcare-nurse-union-busting/
They paid union busting firms such as Crossroads group $400/hour to pull nurses from their patients to sit through the standard litany of involuntary anti union “labor relations” meetings.
@nationalnurses tho involved all of the tactics of a successful & hard fought union election drive: 1 on 1s, collective actions, pictures & statements of nurses proclaiming support, all considered structure tests, as well as reaching out into the community https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/health/covid-health-workers-unions.html
Because of the hard, patient work of the nurses and their union, when the NLRB election was finally held, nurses won their election in a landslide 965 to 411, bringing in the largest hospital union victory in the south since 1975: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/17/north-carolina-nurses-union-hca-healthcare/
That of course is not the end of the struggle, far from it, nurses now have voted to authorize a strike to force HCA to the bargaining table. Strike votes in @nationalnurses are not considered authorizing unless they hit 80% support, to ensure strong support for collective action
Big union campaign fights can be won even in the most hostile political environments in the US south, if they are given the care and resources they demand.
The fight is never over until we win communism. Here is a breakdown by McAlevery on what went wrong this week and how we can organize to win: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/bessemer-alabama-amazon-union/
