Do we stand together, or stand alone?

When we nurses at Backus Hospital decided that the conditions for our patients had gotten bad enough we complained to management.
When multiple individual complaints and pleading brought no change, we decided to speak with one voice.
It was not easy. Management faught us every step of the way, but we stood together because we had tried standing separately to no avail.
Management spent around a million dollars trying to convince 400 nurses not to unionize.
A million dollars!
Why?
All we wanted was a voice so we could care for our patients properly.

They claimed they were looking our for us nurses, protecting us from an outside entity (the union) that would take our money and our voice.
What they failed to understand is that the only outside entity trying to take from us was our own management.
“The Union” is not a thing.
It is not an “outside entity.”
It is not a “third party.”

The union is a group of workers standing together to work collectively on things that are of importance to us, because we realize that unless we stand together, management has all the power.

And that’s why management was willing to spend a million dollars to keep us from unionizing, they want to retain power and control. (Also, remember this, they were not spending money out of their own pockets, they were spending hospital funds.)

A similar situation is playing out across our nation.
So called “Right to Work” groups are telling workers, “drop out of the union, save your union dues, give yourself a raise.”
Again, why?
Is it because they care about workers?

They care about power.
They know when they have power they can write the rules to favor themselves.

Like the nurses at Backus, all workers have a decision to make, a decision that has been ours to make since we started being employed by someone else.
Do we stand together or do we stand alone.