Charting a course, somewhere over Ohio

The last 2 days have been Oakland at the AFT Healthcare Program and Policy Committee.
Nurses and other healthcare professionals from around the country, all AFT members, meeting to provide guidance to the Executive Committee on issues related to healthcare.

I’m at 37,000 feet over Cleveland, we’ve been in the air 4 hours, and with a change of planes in Baltimore and driving home, I hope to be there in another 4 hours.
It a long trip, but then again, it’s been a long trip since I became a Nurse in 1999.
And an interesting trip.

I fell into nursing by accident, due to downturns in the work I was doing building airplanes.
Nursing is a great career.
To be sure, all healthcare is incredibly challenging, dangerous, and stressful.
It’s not for everyone.
But it is for me.
I settled into the ER and loved the challenge, the variety, the teamwork, and the ability to leave at the end of the day knowing I made a difference.
I enjoyed that I had a voice in the care of my patients.
Staff were an asset that was valued.

Somewhere along the line that changed.
Hospitals became corporations.
Staff became an expense.
Patients became customers.

Bumps in a long journey.
Bumps that needed to be smoothed out.
We did that at Backus by forming a union.
We regained our voice.

As I became more involved, I came to see there were so many more lanes to the labor highway than healthcare.
In AFT we have education and public service, and in other unions the trades, the service industry, law enforcement, first responders, manufacturing, and others, even the people working on this plane.
Lots of lanes to this highway, all trying to get to that place that provides a voice for themselves and the people they serve.

And lots of bumps in the road.
There are people in power who prefer we not find that voice, they like things the way they are, they like their power.
Sometimes the bumps in the form of distractions.
Dark state, fake news, crooked Hillary, Birthers, tweets……..
It’s easy to get distracted,
It’s easy to only respond to these distraction bumps in the road.
The danger is that we can forget where we are trying to go.
One of the things that I like about the Mueller investigation into Russian involvement in our elections is that in spite of all the distractions, all the chaos, all the bumps, the investigation moves forward, seemingly never losing site of its goal, the truth.

That’s a lesson for us.

We started out to gain a voice.
We must not forget that.

That’s why we met in Oakland.
To make sure we were still on course and to chart it for the future.
That’s why we in AFT Connecticut set a statewide strategic plan and why our affiliated unions are doing the same.
It’s our road map.
So when the bumps come (often in the form of a crisis or distraction) we deal with them but do not lose focus of our goal, a voice for all workers.