The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Nurses from three unions, including the powerful California Nurses Association, have founded a new national union to influence national health care policies and try to extend California's patient ratio law into other states.
Organizers said the 150,000-member National Nurses United, the largest professional union for registered nurses in the country, will also flex its power to push for a stronger voice in the health care overhaul process going on in Congress and the expansion of representation for nonunion nurses.
The merger, approved Monday at a convention in Phoenix, combines the California union, which has 83,000 members in several states, with the Massachusetts Nurses Union, with 23,000 members, and the 45,000 members from the United American Nurses, who work primarily in the Midwest. The unions will continue to operate separately, but will be aligned under the larger umbrella of National Nurses United.
There's more, much more, because the goal is a captive audience of customers for these unions members:
The nurses, while virtually uniformly in favor of a national or single-payer health care system, a concept that is not on the table in Washington, say they also want a larger voice in setting policies that affect patient care and the quality of health services.
One path on the road to socialist medicine in America.
