California Nurses Association

Just Say No - No More Cuts for Workers

By Rose Ann DeMoro Executive Director, National Nurses United, AFL-CIO | There should be two lasting lessons to emerge from the heroic labor-led protests in Wisconsin. First, working people--with our many allies, students, seniors, women's organizations, and more--are inspired and ready to fight. Second, we need to send a clear and unequivocal message to the right-wing politicians and those in the media suggesting further concessions from working people. —Blog, 02/21/11 More »

California Blog

New Three-Year Pact Means Important Improvements For 17,000 California Kaiser RNs in 61 Facilities

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses United and Kaiser Permanente have tentatively agreed to a new three-year contract with significant improvements for 17,000 registered nurses and nurse practitioners in 21 hospitals and 40 medical office buildings across Northern and Central California, CNA/NNU announced today. —Press Release, 01/11/11 More »

California Press Releases

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned. —Huffington Post, 1/5/11 More »

Healthcare CEOs doing just fine without healthcare law repeal

If the Obama health care bill is just a "government takeover," why are healthcare industry CEOs being rewarded with so much money? —National Nurses Movement, 1/5/11 More »

Health care reform pays big dividends

Health care reform was a big job in 2009, and it paid very well for some executives: Nine of 12 CEOs of health care trade associations made $1 million or more. —Kaiser Health News, 1/5/11 More »

WORK PLACE VIOLENCE

Featured article from the November issue of National Nurse magazine

Not in a Day's Work - Workplace violence for registered nurses is rising steeply, and RNs are rightly refusing to accept it as part of the job. How they’re fighting back.

As any registered nurse can tell you, violence at work can take many different, unexpected forms. It can be the belligerent, drunken 20-something who needs stitches in the ER, or the disoriented, elderly lady in post-op who scratches and tries to bite you every time you change her dressing. Maybe it’s not physical, but a verbal threat to hurt you after work. Sometimes it’s not even the patient, but the patient’s family members who abuse the medical staff. But workplace violence in medical settings does have one thing in common: it’s prevalent, and rising quickly. The Joint Commission, the federal body that accredits hospitals, in June warned that since 2004, the database it keeps of sentinel events on hospital grounds had significant increases in reports of assault, rape, and homicide, with the greatest number of reports from 2007 to 2009.

The healthcare industry has the highest rates of workplace violence among all sectors, constituting 45 percent of the two million incidents that occurred annually in the United States between 1993 and 1999, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And a survey released in July 2009 by the Emergency Nurses Association reported that more than half of all emergency room nurses had been physically assaulted at work, which includes being spit upon, hit, kicked, pushed or shoved, and scratched.