Rose Ann DeMoro Wants Hospitals to Scream

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Under DeMoro, the union threw itself into the broader fight for patients' rights in the face of consolidation in hospital chains and insurers. The NNU simply takes that fight national, says DeMoro. In just eight months the group has already had an impact; in Texas, which has a unionization rate of only 5.1 percent, the NNU just concluded the state's first-ever union nurses' contract, winning a 10.5 percent raise over three years from Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center Hospital in Houston. DeMoro says the NNU aims to add nurses throughout the South and in Catholic hospital chains in the Midwest.

NNU has also supported two strikes in the last few months—a 1,500-member, month-long action to protect benefits at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia and a 12,000-member, one-day strike against 14 hospitals in Minnesota. The strikers got much of what they wanted in Pennsylvania, including continued tuition remission for dependents at the university. Minnesota nurses stymied changes to pension contributions but settled for the employers' offer of a 3 percent salary increase over three years and achieved nothing on minimum staffing ratios.

A study co-authored by MIT's Gruber and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in March found that hospital deaths rose 19 percent during walkouts, based on 20 years of data from New York State. "I don't think standing on a corner yelling and screaming shows a patient advocate," says Sherwood Cox, a critical-care nurse at California's Western Medical Center Santa Ana, who has helped defeat two CNA organizing drives and started a website called Stopunions.com.

DeMoro says she's "completely comfortable" using walkouts to make a negotiating point. (Private hospitals get 10 days legal notice of work action, warning time that allows them to reschedule elective procedures.) She expects more strikes because "employers are testing the nurses, they're trying to get ahead of the nurses' power."

Getting ahead of that power is DeMoro's job, and while she's had unprecedented success in uniting her constituents, it remains to be seen whether she can go beyond inspiration and taunts to achieve the change she's promised. Her attitude toward hospitals and insurers ("They think I'm radical, that basically it's unreasonable that I think that the nurses should win every battle, but I do.") doesn't suggest a demeanor amenable to shifting from agitator to stateswoman. Which means DeMoro's opponents should expect lots more pain in the years ahead.

Lawrence is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

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