Striking Ashtabula Nurses Speak

Photographs by Ján McElwain-Bell

Interviews by Marycatherine Krause

Dolly Waddle, Emergency Room nurse, AGNA negotiating team member:

This isn't the first time the nurses have revolted. We tried to do it 15 · years ago, but we didn't have any backing at that point in time. We could have a union, but we had no backing from the National Labor Relations Board or anything. We had no way to get recognized, be certified, and that kind of thing. The administrator would not even meet with us. The ONA representative came out and spoke with us several times; we had meetings in homes. But that administrator, he just locked his door and wouldn't talk with any of us. So finally, we just gave up. We weren't strong enough at that point in time. But it was that we were unhappy then and we've not ever been any happier. And it (the strike) all seemed to gel at once. Again, why? I'm not sure. Things just never got any better; they only got worse.

UNFR TO RNS

Page 8/What She Wants/October, 1981

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The longest nurses' strike in U.S. history began. 14 months ago on July 21, 1980. At a predawn meeting held in a stuffy room above an Ashtabula restaurant, the Ashtabula General Nurses Association voted to strike. Organizing to remedy ills at Ashtabula General Hospital, AGNA raised issues that concern nurses-administration employment practices, nursing practice issues, and economics-whether it be in the hospital, community, industry or elsewhere.

Unionizing to address these and other issues is, however, a recent development in nursing. "Nursing, as a profession," commented Mary Runyan, "is way, way far behind." Some of the earliest organizing attempts date back to the late 1940s. In 1966, the Ohio Nurses Association (ONA) won its first contract in Youngstown. With almost 20 local unit contracts, ONA is unaffiliated, an independent professional association. While this may make for an uneasy alliance with organized labor, Hazel Lehtinen, as other AGNA nurses, believes that "nurses must speak for nurses, and be concerned about what's happening to other nurses...and not have the doctors or the hospial association or the trade union speak for nurses. Nurses need to be organized to some extent, preferably by an organization that knows nurses.'

There is no consensus among nurses that collective bargaining is the thing to do. There are organizing efforts and there is opposition within the ranks. Ann Bachnick, a nurse with the Cleveland Visiting Nurses Association (VNA), which signed its first contract with VNA nurses in July, 1981 expressed the ambivalence within the profession when she said: "I think that 'people have a hard time. And I had a hard time. Nurses are supposed to be professionals. And you have this idea that professionals are not supposed to strike. And I had a hard time with that when I first came to VNA, which was in September, 1980. But, in our situation, we had tried other means, people had tried going to the administration in groups, and we just didn't have the power. And to really change things, I think that you need something like a union to organize and get it together to have that power to change things.

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Mary Runyan:

And I think very definitely that it's a woman's movement. We only have two remaining male nurses and they are both on our negotiating team. But these (pointing to the hospital) are men—an almost all-male doctor staff and Board of Trustees who don't want these women telling them what to do.

Joan Kalhorn, ONA attorney:

This is only a very small part of the whale question of whether women employees will assert their rights. These nurses are the sisters of the Wilmar 8, the San Jose City workers who organized, went out, and won. It's real important in terms of nursing. It is generally true that nursing is a low-status position. Nurses are not treated as professionals, nor are they paid as professionals. There's an educational process that goes on in the workplace during organizing efforts. If you could see the transformation in these nurses. At the beginning, they'd say “Gee, I've never done it before." Now they say "So what, let's do it." There's nothing they can't try, there's nothing they can't do.

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