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Are you a MNA Member with something to say? Then send us an e-mail to find out how your voice can be heard on the MNA Blog!
Are you a MNA Member with something to say? Then send us an e-mail to find out how your voice can be heard on the MNA Blog!
mr. nemo, i am forwaeding one response from the star tribune. website on 5/18. this was a comment following the article by ken paulos and mark eustis. ” Tel a Lie to Hide a Huge One” “the day i listen to a millionaire CEO cry aboutnhow much nurses make, is the day i start banging my head against a cement wall in order to gain an enhanced level of conxciousness. how about you guys fire most of your management staff or at least reduce hteir compensatipn to the same as nurses. better yet why not save some real money and just send me one bill for one visir ro your hospital. of one bill for each department(sent at different tomes)at your facility, that provided treatment, My Wifes last visit to a local clinic resulted in five seaprate billings and (of course) subsequent billings that I am still trying to resolve. We have a medical delivery system that is inefficientm bloated and just plain stupidm and it has nothing to do with nurses. Don’t let the xmoke and mirrors of these whining CEO’s distract you from this” posted by montaguezx on may 18,10 at 11:12 pm. there are more good comments on may 19. I think the public should be aware that Mr. Paulos makes 22 million dollars per year.
It takes 2 to break up and 2 to make up. I am disappointed in Allina as well as MNA. Get back to the discussions – cooperate – find middle ground. Both of the parties are acting like toddlers fighting over a toy. Allina and the MNA need to check their EGO’S at the door and get back to discussions for the patients, for the employees, for the public. Nothing can be solved by having a temper tantrum and going to the corner for a time out. Get over it and discuss it. I don’t care if you sit and discuss it for 8 hours – it’s your job – both sides should get on with it or find someone that will.
Once we get the ratios implemented and the hospitals hire more nurses, how much will our dues go down? I assume with more sisters and brothers in the union that MNA will be more efficient. I would like to take more money home to help feed and clothe my kids.
Why don’t you work an extra shift to clothe your kids? Better yet, stop having kids. Don’t you think the MNA staff deserve a fair wage to represent you?
Ha are you joking!!
With all of the U.S. citizens out of work, how can you justify a strike for more money?
Next, if the stress is too much, change careers. All companies are tightening their belts, join the club.
To Mr. Brz, Sally Anderson (real name… doubt it), MAS, and other assorted actors:
Union One – No Union Busters – Don’t Believe the Hype!
http://www.nobusters.org
I hope when you have your heart attack the hospital you are in is short staffed.
With MNA taking in 10 million yearly in union dues, and no large strike since 1984,there should be a very large strike fund to help nurses at this time . Most nurses live check to check and will need help.
I hope the hospitals don’t give into your demands. It is SO SAD, how all we hear is “its about staffing” yet your going to walk out for the day! WOW, thats safe staffing isn’t it!!!! Its about money, yet you say its “Not about money its about staffing.” Why don’t you drop your outrageous demands for pay increases then. We the public know the truth… all you care about is your money and pension, you don’t care about patients / staffing. If you ‘truley’ became a nurse to care for people you would NEVER walk out for a day! HOLD STRONG HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATION!!! DO NOT GIVE INTO THE DEMANDS OF MNA!!!
You taught me to care at the highest level. It’s all I know how to do. To care for others, one must also care for oneself. For the record, it’s NOT about the pay. It’s about being able to safely care for patients. I know it’s hard to understand. The hospitals are worried about the money. We’re worried about the people. The ‘demands’ are not unreasonable, nor even expensive. Please support us. You’ve been here.
To MAS:
Maybe you need to educate yourself a little bit more before coming to this site and: “throwing stones…” are you so just and honorable that you can really do that?”
Are you sure you’re not just a 12 year old pretending to be a grown up? Or how about a strike buster? A nasty human being? I bet you have a poison apple in your basket don’t you? No, I don’t want one of your nice shiney apples!
Maybe you should read the following letter that was written by a very wise man.
Might just do you some good… in more ways than one…
………………………………………………………….
(This was submitted from the husband of a MNA RN to both newspapers here in the Twin Cities but we have yet to see it published.)
A Modest Proposal for the Nurses
Wise people teach us that the best way to understand another person is to
walk a mile in his shoes.
So to resolve the issues between nurses and health care bureaucrats, let
them walk a mile in each other’s shoes. For bureaucrats these means
going out and buying uniforms and some relatively inexpensive white tennis
shoes, mostly women’s sizes. For nurses it will mean some serious
shopping and wardrobe upgrading, no more of that one uniform on my back and
one in the wash mentality.
But the shoes and uniforms are only the beginning. To really get where
somebody else is coming from, you have to do all you can to get inside
their skin. Bureaucrats are going to have to learn to live on, let’s
say, the average salary for an RN. This is going to require a major cut
back in family expenditures, even some living from paycheck to paycheck.
But they’ll learn that if they’re careful, clip those coupons, and
watch for the sales, a nurse can claim to be middle class. Maybe they’ll
even learn to thank the union that has made this possible.
And the bureaucrats will learn some of the joys of being a registered
nurse. They’ll know what it’s like to come home very tired but with
the self respect that comes from actually helping other people. True, with
their greatly reduced income they won’t be able to afford country clubs
any longer, but they’ll get free exercise being on their feet all day.
True also, they won’t be able to afford to do a lot of travel, but they
will get to meet hard working Tibetans, dedicated west Africans, gentle
Somalis, and all those new Americans who empty the trash, mop the floors,
and do their best to keep hospital rooms clean.
It’s going to be tougher for the nurses: serious shopping to buy
corporate clothes, finding the right financial advisor to invest all that
extra money, and learning how to work sitting down. But they’ll get to
meet aggressive union busting lawyers, those delightful heads of companies
that provide $1600-2200/day replacement nurses (in addition to round trip
out of state travel expenses, luxury hotel accommodations, three meals a
day, paid expenses of establishing a MN nursing license, perhaps extra pay
for remembering to actually ADMIT patients), and maybe even fly off to
learn management techniques from Toyota in Japan. Hear the one about the
suddenly accelerating pacemaker?
I’m pretty sure that the stress of all that money and the longing to get
back to really helping people would cause the nurses soon to plead to
return to the bargaining table. For the bureaucrats, it may take one more
lesson in humility. So let them go back to their offices, but under the
work rules they want to impose on our nurses.
For example, they could be “bureaucrats on call”. They’d wouldn’t
get regular shifts or be trained into a particular office. They’d be a
kind of pool of bureaucrats to be called in when there’s not safe
bureaucrat staffing. Of course, they wouldn’t know from week to week how
much they’d earn, but they’d get used to it. And speaking of “unsafe
staffing” in this new world, the nurses will decide how many bureaucrats
are needed on a particular shift of bureaucrats.
Actually this last won’t be too hard. Having too few bureaucrats at a
meeting wouldn’t be dangerous, just a little lonesome. But don’t have
enough nurses on a hospital unit and sooner or later a patient who could
have survived will die.
If my modest proposal is adopted, I believe that both sides will be eager
to resume bargaining, maybe a little wiser and a little humbler. And I
believe that the Minnesota sense of cooperation, fair play, common sense,
and passion for the common good will prevail so that a just settlement will
be reached that keeps our hospitals safe and among the best in our nation.
The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Griggs
“For the union to put forth a vote to strike indicates the union is not interested in negotiations but in conflict,” said Maureen Schriner. They need to fire this woman, after all that has been said she CLEARLY isn’t getting ANYTHING!! Oh, wait……she does believe her own lies!!!
MNA Leadership and members, please read. I posted this a few days ago on Facebook, but it is worth getting out again.
Publicly call for support from sympathetic patients to the MNA cause. Specifically ask those who have elective procedures scheduled or thinking of scheduling to state that they are postponing until after a fair and safe contract can be agreed upon. If patients began rescheduling procedures …even a month out this would tighten a much needed revenue source. The healthcare systems have budgeted money to break the union….but they have not budgeted for a reduction in their revenue sources. This is the most effective way to financially get them to the table.
Honestly, the next step would be to ask the public to take their non-emergent or urgent care visits to go to Regions, HCMC, or independent medical centers urgent care departments (such as Apple Valley Medical Center). It is unrealistic to expect the public to be able to do an all out boycot of Allina, Fairview, Healtheast, Childrens Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, and North Memorial & Methodist Hospitals….but they cannot afford to take even the slightest hit in revenue that they were not budgeting to loose. This hit will get the board of directors attention and more importantly the concern of their creditors.
The CEOs and the board of directors have heard MNA’s bark. The CEO’s and the board of directors have seen MNA’s teeth. Let the CEOs and the boards now feel MNAs bite! Hit them in the pocket book till they agree to a fair and safe contract.
The whole campaign of profits before patients was supposed to support nurses in Minnesota and protect them. As a nurse from southern Minnesota who’s been watching and trying to decide if we should have the MNA help us, I’ve just got my answer.
As soon as your happy little pensions were settled, you dropped the whole protecting patients thing pretty quick. I’m very upset that the MNA and nurses hid behind that wonderful ideal, just to sell out over a small pension bonus. Sure you will try to settle by 2011, good luck.
Now for us nurses who were on the fence about thinking the MNA could actually make a change in Minnesota and finally do something like protect our licensure and work conditions with staffing ratio’s, well we just saw where the really issue is.
So for those who fell for your profits before patients, like me, I’m ashamed that I fell for it.
In those who were on the fence about needing the MNA, your actions just educated us in knowing that it’s a waste of time and money, because that’s all they care about.
A unhappy Minnesota Nurse.
To Do:
The issue of ratios belongs in the legislature. Just as daycare has ratios, Mn will also pass something to protect patients in the future. MNA action has made the public question why we don’t have anything in law and can you trust a CEO…best of luck deciding which side of the fence to fall on…
To Do:
You need to either educate yourself as to what actually took place in negotiations (and what was involved in that process) or put the effort forth to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. You can sit on your butt and judge and whine or you can help to establish laws that will benefit and promote higher ideals… or you can do what you just did in your posting. So you go right ahead and be “ashamed”… I will continue to support MNA RNs (and be proud of the fact), their mission and fighting to improve Minnesota. I will continue to promote and improve nursing and safety in Minnesota. (Nurses have always had to fight for better care and conditions in order to provide caregiving… it’s what nurses do and it’s a part of our legacy). You will continue to do whatever it is that you do. You can continue to be as you signed: “A unhappy Minnesota Nurse” – or – you can work on getting happy by making a difference. Isn’t it nice to know that we have choices in life…
Dear Unhappy Minnesota Nurse,
There were many good reasons in this very hardball negotiating scene why our negotiators really needed to recommend an affirmative vote on the last offer by TCH. Please understand that nurses weren’t the only party in these negotiations and we weren’t negotiating with ourselves. We were negotiating with corporate America. In preserving our contract we preserved decades of negotiations, contracts and sacrifices made by those who went before. Part of that contract that you so vilify contains unit closure language which allows a charge nurse to lock a unit to further admissions without more staff to care for the patients. Had our contract been jettisoned – and it might have been if we turned down this offer and went on strike – this provision might have disappeared and we would have had nothing at all to help our patients with this issue. We don’t always get what we want or hope for. We were up against a formidable opponent. We didn’t prevail in this form at this time but we did not give up and the issue has been raised in Minnesota as never before. Before you make sweeping accusations about fellow nurses you need to talk with some of the bargaining agents for MNA and get the facts, unless, of course, you are just another troll and really are not interested in facts. Why are you unwilling to put your name on your message?
We are parents with a serious issue at the new U of M childrens hospital.
First, the staff, nurses especially, that we have dealt with at the U are amazing, attentive and caring and I don’t know how we would have gotten through the past year and a half without them–thank you!
We have a child with brain cancer (gleoblastoma) and have been going to the U of M hospital for 18 months. We are in for several days a month, and every hour of every day with our child is important.
We were suprised that the new spacious rooms in the PICU are “specifically” furnished (we’ve been told) to allow only one parent to stay over night. Even the family lounges have only straight back chairs and very short love-seats not made for sleeping. For us–too close to stay at Ronald McD house, yet an hour away from door to door, this is not a realistic option. Our son needs us, and we need to be with him, period.
We completely understand that there are legitimate reasons for not allowing patient rooms to become hotel rooms, however, there is ample room in the PICU rooms for two recliners or the existing sleeper-chair and a recliner–every medical staff (nurses, docs) we’ve talked to agree.
Whoever made this decision has never had a sick kid, or simply doesn’t care about parents with sick kids.
Otherwise, the parking is nice!
Disappointed: Thank you for sharing your story, and I think it’s safe to say our nurses totally understand and agree with your concern! Especially with sick children it is so important as a parent to be there at their side 24/7 for support, love and reassurance if nothing else. I hope your voice is heard and the situation improved. Thanks for sharing and know that we are thinking of you!