Celebrate Nursing!!!

Nevada RNformation, May 2006 by van Betten, Patricia

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND UNION ACTIVITY. WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH NURSING??

Celebrate Nursing! introduces you to a sampling of professional nurses, activists for quality patient care, who saw the connection between nursing and collective bargaining as vital and imperative. Much of what we now take for granted is the result of their determined effort.

MARY LUCIEL McGORKY 1903-1990

In 1937, Mary McGorky saw union activity by nurses as critical to improving both professional nursing and quality patient care. Even as traditional nursing organizations labeled her work as "inappropriate," McGorky organized 3000 nurses in New York state and skillfully built political support for nursing issues. One success replaced the traditional 10 hour split shift with the 8 hour continual shift. Nursing's collective efforts improved hospital sanitation, kept unqualified workers from providing bedside care and kept them from giving medication. McGorky, astute and outspoken, called the transition of hospitals to corporations "impersonal and profit driven." She compared the changes to tidal waves.

These forces [of change] made hospitals larger and larger until they aped the mammoth industrial corporations and even housed themselves in enormous skyscrapers. This ever-spreading complex magnified the pattern of life itself, and out of it two far-reaching tidal waves emerged:

1) work, including white collar work, became group activity on a scale so colossal that a single individual no longer had meaning; and

2) the employer was no longer a human being but an impersonal entity acting for unknown or absent human beings who did not own the enterprise.

The first tidal wave made the white collar worker as insignificant individually as one of the laborers on an assembly line.

The second tidal wave put the welfare of the white collar worker at the mercy of managers who did not own the enterprise. (1939)

Read more about it:

McGorky, M. A Red-head Grows Up. New Nurse 3: 3-4, 1939.

McGorky, M. Pie-man, Pie-man, Let Me Taste Your Wares. New Nurse: 12: 6-9, 1939.

Donahue, MP: Mary Luciel McGorky. In Bullough, V., Sentz, L. (eds): American Nursing a Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3. NY: Springer, 2000.

KATHERINE GREENOUGH 1920-1975

Katherine Greenough recognized that collective bargaining was important for nurses and enjoyed working on labor relations. She had excellent organizational and clinical nursing research skills. She helped design local collective bargaining units for nurses in Pennsylvania and remained committed to union activity even though colleagues called her a "commie and red" during the McCarthy era.

Greenough earned a bachelor's degree in political science before she entered nursing. Her career included clinical nursing, nursing research and nursing education. She worked on a pre-hospital coronary care project that compared ambulance response time with heart attack victims to outcomes; her findings led to both improved ambulance service and the start of the 911 emergency call system.

Our greatest assets in attracting members seem to be . . . those programs that offer the member opportunity to take a personal part in the improvement of her professional and economic life. The programs that are more directly framed and carried by the members are those that have the greatest sales appeal. 1954

Read more about it:

Greenough, K. Why Do They Join? AJN: 54: 816-818, 1954.

Cooper, SS. Katherine Greenough in Bullough, V., Sentz, L. Stein, AP (eds): American Nursing: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 2. Garland, 1992.

VERONICA MARGARET DRISCOLL 1926-1994

Nursing continues to benefit from the powerful legacy of this determined nursing advocate. Veronica Driscoll, a member of the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame, distinguished herself through her work for professional independence, economic justice and high standards for nursing education. She led the collective bargaining team for the New York State Nurses Association in the 1960s. They negotiated better working conditions and benefits. Driscoll is credited with passage of the NY Nurse Practice Act in 1972 and it became a national model. She helped nurses become more independent by helping them to understand their value. She chaired the ANA Commission on Economic and General Welfare, served on the board of directors for the American Journal of Nursing and the NY state nurses association headquarters building is named in her honor.

The evidence that nursing is a professional endeavor is far too overwhelming to refute. An examination of the nature of the nursing process reveals that it is founded on a body of knowledge which embodies an exquisite humanistic and intellectual mix, a process encompassing diagnosis, intervention, application, and caring skills and abilities of the highest order. The fact that this profession has not been so recognized, legally, is part of nursing's tragic history. 1972

Read more about it:

Driscoll. VM. Liberating Nursing Practice. Nursing Outlook. 20:26, 1972.