Rose Ann DeMoro Wants Hospitals to Scream

Labor firebrand Rose Ann DeMoro of California is out to build a powerful new super union

DeMoro, at a nurses' union rally, rarely has trouble being heard Robyn Twomey

By Dune Lawrence

This past April, Rose Ann DeMoro—a former supermarket cashier from St. Louis—looked at billionaire California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and had an idea. DeMoro found a Los Angeles drama teacher, dressed her in a crown and faux ermine, and sent her out to tail Whitman across the state. Joined by tuxedoed bodyguards named "Goldman" and "Sachs," "Queen Meg" now spends her days taunting Whitman up close. "The new corporate aristocracy, they're used to unilateral control, no democracy," says DeMoro. "The script just wrote itself."

DeMoro is expert at dishing out political pain with a flourish, a talent that has endeared her to her 86,000 constituents in the California Nurses Assn. Under DeMoro's leadership, the union has recast itself from a special-interest trade group to a consumer and patient advocate that lobbies hard—and volubly—for universal health care and patients' rights. As membership in organized labor has withered nationwide, reaching a record low of 7.2 percent in the private sector last year, CNA's rolls have increased fivefold since DeMoro took over in 1993. It now represents about a quarter of the state's working nurses. "Nurses are the last line of defense for patients," says DeMoro from a seat in her cactus-filled office at the union's Oakland headquarters. "This isn't about just bread-and-butter issues for registered nurses, this is about living in a good and a just society."

Having spent the past six years creatively torturing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, DeMoro, 61, would like to take her cause national. In December, CNA linked with United American Nurses and the Massachusetts Nurses Assn. to form the 155,000-member National Nurses United (NNU). DeMoro was named executive director, and she aims to turn NNU into a superunion of the nation's 2.6 million registered nurses. That will take some doing. Many RNs already belong to other unions. But if NNU recruits across the country at the same rate that it has in California, it would have 650,000 members and the ability to strike hospitals on a national scale.

DeMoro already looms large enough to her California opponents. The Whitman camp retaliated for the "Queen Meg" routine with a website noting that "Boss Rose," who isn't a nurse, has a salary of more than $293,000, almost five times the median for nurses nationally. The site also accuses her of turning the union into "an arm of the California Democratic Party" aligned with Whitman's opponent, Jerry Brown, whom the union endorsed in March. To which DeMoro replies gleefully: guilty as charged. "Everybody's supposed to believe that in order to be a reasonable person you have to believe that we're all in this together," she says. "I'm an advocate, I'm on a side."

DeMoro grew up working-class. Her Italian father ran a pizza parlor, her Irish mother operated a beauty salon. One of six siblings, she and a brother were the first in her family to go to college. DeMoro met her husband in high school, and after college at Southern Illinois University they moved to California in 1977, where DeMoro pursued a doctorate in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was writing her dissertation on supermarket cashiers (titled "Checking Out Sexism") when she decided she'd rather organize than teach.

Her mission remains unabashedly grounded in women's empowerment. More than 90 percent of CNA members are women, and a wall in DeMoro's office bears a sign saying "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History." "Nurses have been held down," DeMoro says, and part of her job has been to create a "culture of feminism" that helps them fight back.

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