DC Nurses Take Medstar Fight To Baltimore

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

As dignitaries cut ribbons inside the gleaming new $175 million Patient Care Tower, more than a hundred nurses from the Washington Hospital Center lined the street outside the Franklin Square Health Center in Rosedale, just outside Baltimore. “It’s about patient care,” registered nurse Ndip Ayuk-Takor (middle, at left) told Union City as his fellow nurses – clad in bright red union t-shirts – chanted “They say cutbacks we say fight back!” The nurses had traveled up from Washington in pouring rain but the clouds lifted, the rain stopped and the sun even peeped out from time to time during their two-hour leafleting. “We’re passionate about our jobs,” Ayuk-Takor said. “Our work is literally life and death and we bring joy into our patients' lives every day. All we’re asking is that the hospital give us the resources we need to do our work and to serve our patients.” Instead, he said, the Washington Hospital Center (WHC) – one of MedStar’s nine area hospitals, and the only one with unionized nurses – last month imposed scheduling and pay changes that are exacerbating problems with short-staffing at the Level 1 trauma hospital. “When we’re tired and overworked, it’s not just us who suffers, it’s our patients. And without the union, we have no voice at all; how will we defend ourselves?” asked Ayuk-Takor. “Support your nurses,” Shannon Tyree (bottom, at right) told passing motorists as she handed them flyers, “You may need us someday.” Yesterday’s leafleting is part of an escalation of the ongoing campaign by WHC nurses to win a contract that protects both workers and patients, said National Nurses United Director of Strategic Campaigns Director Ken Zinn. “WHC is trying to punish their nurses for joining with NNU,” said Zinn, “because we’ve had an extraordinarily successful year, winning contracts and strikes across the country, as well as organizing nearly 8,000 new members.” Zinn also noted that, like many other employers, “MedStar is trying to take advantage of the economic climate to take away gains that nurses have fought for and won. They’re testing us, but the truth is that patients don’t come to hospitals for doctors, they come for the nurses, and these are the best of the best.” - report/photos by Chris Garlock