Labor Union In Healthcare
Even though the number of nurses joining labor unions has been on the decrease, several factors may have contributed to this. The fact that the unions are led and managed by the labor lawyers and not individuals with a nursing background has been a limiting factor to some of the nurses that have felt that they are underrepresented. In that their interests were not being well advocated for. At the same time, there was a huge challenge in that there are numerous unions that are not purely meant for nurses only. This is backed by the fact that nurses are just part of the unions as members; hence they may not dictate what is done to the union since there are other players involved. At the same time, it has been established that there is no cause of a single union that represents all the nurses to be it in the state or the federal stature.
The existence of unions has been key in promoting the wages paid to the nurses. The nurses that are in the union are paid about 20 percent higher than those that are not members of any union. The higher pay is mainly attributed to the negotiating power that most of the unions get for their members; hence the members have some competitive advantage when it comes to the working environment as well as the amount of pay they were going to get. The negative thing that has been attributed to the union nurses has been the cases of strikes that many engage in, which usually lead to higher costs from the hospital’s side. It has been stated that there has been a huge number of people usually participate in the strike, which leads to the loss of lives to some of the patients. It has also been stated that a huge number of people that die as a result of the strike. It is also the same time period that the health care outcomes usually decline during these strikes.
It has also been established that about $46 million is used to train the employees after each and every strike. It has also been established that there is a direct relationship between nurse unions and patient outcomes. It has been established that hospitals with successful unionization have slightly improved patient outcomes when it comes to hospital-acquired infections as well as the rate of readmissions for the patients that may have left the hospitals in the recent past. It has also been established that despite the good work that may have been done or achieved through the unions, there have been many cases of unions taking advantage of the nurses. In other words, the union leaders are benefiting a lot from their activities in that they threaten the hospital facilities to adhere to their needs or else they organize strikes.
In my opinion, it is clear that there has been a lot of commercialization of the unions. This has been backed by the fact that the greed and the interest of the union leaders are the key determinants of what happens in the union and not the members’ interests. The lack of a single union that has been able to represent the interests of the nurses across the nation has been one of the many reasons many nurses have been leaving the unions since they feel their interests are not being addressed but on the contrary they are simply being used as the pawns in the chess game that is aimed at benefiting individuals. There is time for the unions to be regulated as well since it is not good enough to claim to be caring for the nurses when the reality is indeed different. The author of the article has also been able to deliver high quality perspectives from two ends. Each of the perspectives have been indeed well detailed giving insights to anyone who wants to be a nurse on whether or not they should be able to join a union or not.
References:
Registered Nursing.Org. (2020). Do Unions Benefit or Harm Healthcare & Nursing Industries? Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/USER/Downloads/Do%20Unions%20Benefit%20or%20Harm%20Healthcare%20%20Nursing%20Industries_%20__%20RegisteredNursingorg%20(1).pdf