California Nurses Association, a real Union?

[R_P_A_S]

Last night amid new years celebrations I met this girl who is a nurse here in California. I over heard her talking to an other person about how unhappy she is with the Union and just with the doctors and hospitals.

She then got other people in the conversation. "I dont want to be part of the Union, But I pretty much had to join the California Nurses Association because they already making my life miserable at the Hospital as it is, They treat me like a second class Nurse." An other argument she was making, but i don't recall her exact words, she was pissed about how many times they make them "clock out" and How they Unions make it mandatory to take "too many breaks" and I guess all this other cheap tricks to keep the nurses under a certain number of hours.

Then more people joined in the conversation. They too hated Unions and most of the dislike in unions was about how they are organized, how they "try to control you" and the fees or something like that.

My question to you guys is...

1. how many types of Unions are there? do some serve the bosses more than the workers?

2. Are most workers under "false" Unions? which leads to their negative impression on them?

3. Could we not blame Unions, and other fellow workers but the bosses? for keeping us divided and their never ending ways to exploit labor?

and an other thing. this Girl, the Nurses she was telling me some fucked up stories about the Hospital, and just the wicked U.S. Health Care industry. How some pharmaceutical have contracts and deals with the Hospitals and Doctors to prescribe THEIR brand of drugs.. WOW!

fucking SICK.

[R_P_A_S]

whats up!

[Luís Henrique]

1. how many types of Unions are there? do some serve the bosses more than the workers?

I don't know, of course. Here in Brazil there probably are five or six politically different kinds of unions. But the United States are quite certainly much more diverse.


2. Are most workers under "false" Unions? which leads to their negative impression on them?

Those aren't "false" unions, they are yellow unions. Yes, certainly most workers in the United States - and in the world at large - are under yellow unions. But my experience is that most workers who dislike their unions (I am not saying that this is the case of the girl you are talking about) do not have class conscience at all. They see the unions like some act of God or natural phenomenon, that they feel totally unable to impact, and they seem not to realise that, in the absence of a union, the bourgeois would encroach on their rights much harder than they already do. This is, more often than not, accompanied by an individualist ideology ("I don't need no union, I am going to solve my problem by myself, by going to college/becoming a civil servant/starting my own business").


3. Could we not blame Unions, and other fellow workers but the bosses? for keeping us divided and their never ending ways to exploit labor?

Well, in the great picture yes, capitalism is responsible for most if not all of working class people's problems. But this should not excuse yellow unions and unionists - they help capitalists exploiting workers, and they take a share in such exploitation.


and an other thing. this Girl, the Nurses she was telling me some fucked up stories about the Hospital, and just the wicked U.S. Health Care industry. How some pharmaceutical have contracts and deals with the Hospitals and Doctors to prescribe THEIR brand of drugs.. WOW!

Are you surprised by this? It seems obvious; people need medical prescriptions to buy medicine; bribing physicians to prescribe their brand seems the obvious step for pharmaceutical corporations... It could only be countered, I suppose, by legislation making mandatory that the prescriptions referred to no commercial names, just to the chemical formula (like, physicians can only prescribe acetilsalicic acid, not Aspirin (tm)).

I don't know what the best course of action it is for the nurse you are quoting. Perhaps organising to take the union back from these guys; perhaps organising another union to break this one's power. In principle unity should be preserved, but in practice it is not always possible. But two general considerations should be kept in mind: 1. only grassroots organisation can confront yellow unionism (and prevent an authentic union from degenerating into a yellow one); 2. people must speak out against the way the union is conducted.

Luís Henrique

[R_P_A_S]

Luis Henrique thank you for answering in such detail!