Union-oriented slate tops NY Nurses election

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N.Y. Nurses United, the pro-union opposition group in the New York State Nurses Association, chalked up an important gain in the August election of top officers. NYSNA two-year term elections are staggered. This time, of the six positions to be filled, the opposition group had nominated four and called for a write-in for a fifth. Of its four candidates on the ballot, it elected three.

A total of 2,703 members cast their mail ballots. Judy Sheridan Gonzalez was elected vice president with 1,345 votes; Anne Bove and Shirley Hunter were elected at-large members of the Board of Directors by 1,315 and 1,100 respectively.

Their opposition caucus ends up as before with four on the 13-person NYSNA Board of Directors (Pat Kane, one of the opposition leaders, remains on the board. Her term had not expired). But that figure does not indicate the full extent of the opposition success.

In this election Judy Gonzalez, previously an at-large board member, was now running for a top officer position against Barbara Crane, one of the top leaders of the dominant NYSNA management. Crane had been president of the NYSNA collective bargaining general assembly. She had been a member of the NYSNA board. She is a director of the American Nurses Association and is president of the new National Federation of Nurses, an assemblage of state nurses associations that was initiated by NYSNA and which claims an affiliated membership of 70,000. Despite all that, Crane was defeated by Gonzalez 1,345 to 1,284.

Like other nurses associations which are affiliated with the American Nurses Association, the New York State Nurses Association is a kind of hybrid. Its membership includes employed bedside nurses, management representatives, administrators, PR reps, researchers, and others. The opposition wants NYSNA to function more like a union representing nurses in hospitals and less like an agency of management. And it wants NYSNA to be organized less like a corporation and more like a union. From the standpoint of the membership, NYSNA is a bureaucratic nightmare. The Board of Directors, elected by the general membership, hires a CEO who has full authority to hire and fire all paid personnel. The CEO appoints the equivalent of the executive director of NYSNA’s collective bargaining division.

There is a nagging difficulty, one highlighted in this election. NYSNA claims 36,000 members. Of these, 34,000 are working nurses. But only 2,703 voted in this election. That leaves management, with its control over the Board of Directors and its authoritarian domination of the entire paid NYSNA personnel statewide, plenty of resources for organization and election maneuvering. Nevertheless after the results of this election, management is nervous, perhaps even getting desperate. It has lost one contest after another.

When Judy Gonzalez, now on the state Board Directors, was running for reelection in November as president of the big Montefiore Hospital unit, management tried to unseat her by running an opposition candidate. Gonzalez was reelected with 400 votes of the 600 cast. On the other hand, management’s candidate for grievance chair, an incumbent running for reelection, was defeated by a Gonzalez-supported candidate.

At NYSNA’s November convention, management supporters proposed to abolish the Delegate Assembly. As the key democratically elected representative body of all the collective bargaining units, the Delegate Assembly is the very core of NYSNA’s union sector. In essence, the Assembly is the union. The convention rejected the proposal.

The supporters of NYSNA management have been trying to intimidate its critics into silence, or even get rid of them, so far without success, but they keep trying. Back in 2007, 23 nurses faced a disciplinary trial on charges relating to their opposition to the Board of Director’s decision to disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO United American Nurses. But management was forced to back down when three intended victims sued in Federal court. In 2009, NYSNA was forced to pay their attorney fees and grant its critics the right to present their views to members at NYSNA expense.

But try and try again. In 2010, they moved against Anne Bove, the same who was just elected to the NYSNA Board of Directors. Bove had the floor at a statewide meeting of NYSNA representatives where she criticized the Board for disaffiliating from the United American Nurses without a membership vote whereupon she was physically threatened by Barbara Crane, the same who was just defeated by Judy Gonzalez. Unbelievable outcome: Bove faced charges of improper conduct. Once again, they were forced to backtrack by the threat of Federal court action.

But try and try again and again. This time they are going after Pat Kane. She is one of the four insurgent members of the NYSNA Board of Directors. Although her term had not expired, and she was not on the ballot in the recent election, management campaigners bombarded her with denunciations in their campaign literature. In November, she got the ominous letter from the NYSNA CEO: a “disciplinary complaint” has been filed against her for “conduct that is detrimental or injurious to the Association.” She is informed that the complaint was initiated by a partisan of management, Eileen Dunn, a member of the ruling Board of Directors and treasurer of the Delegate Assembly. But what is Kane’s offending “conduct”? Where and when? No details. Franz Kafka would understand.