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NEWS & LETTERS, DECEMBER 2003Organize Memphis community hospital!Memphis, Tenn.--We need justice. We nurses have been under fire from the Regional Medical Center (the Med) management ever since we started to organize in the early part of this year (see "Tenn. nurses organize," July 2003 N&L). We are working in a hostile work environment. They are targeting union supporters. They are after us, because we want to take care of our patients. I don’t like it when I see people waiting and there are no beds for them. They got emergency room patients laying out in the hall with their paramedics watching over them. We don’t even have decent headlights for the neurosurgeon to do a craniotomy. I was a kid when Martin Luther King Jr., came here and I was working at the Med. I saw what went on. I saw Louis Donelson, the chairman of the board, standing next to then-Mayor Henry Loeb, saying it would be a cold day in hell before there was ever a union in this town. King lost his life over that. Every single person in my department who has been disciplined has been a union supporter. One nurse was suspended and another fired. Another woman who was fired was supposed to have a grievance hearing within two weeks, but she didn’t have a hearing for almost five months. Another woman was suspended for four or five days in March. She still hasn’t had a grievance hearing. She was given a final warning and 15 months probation. If she looks sideways during that 15 months, she’s out the door, and they still haven’t let her have a grievance hearing. This is the kind of stuff we are up against. We took a survey asking what the nurses wanted out of the union. The first six items nurses listed were patient care-related. We want a safe environment for our patients, better equipment to take care of our patients, a better nurses-to-patient ratio. "I’d like to have a raise" didn’t come in until number seven. The administration has tried desperately to make everybody think that we are just money hungry. Not one of us has asked for money. It’s the people of this community that we care about. The Med management is trying to make this a Black and white thing by pitting the Black and white nurses against each other. This started when we began the union activity last year. But they are not going to separate us, they are not going to divide us. --Med nurses, Black and white |
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