Thank you

Thank you members of AFT Connecticut for allowing me to do what I do.

Thank you teachers, PSRPs, and those in higher education for the dedication you have to future generations. 

Thank you public employees for the safety and services you provide us all, often without any recognition.

Please know that you are appreciated.

Also, please allow me a moment of personal privilege to address our sisters and brothers that are nurses and healthcare professions, especially those still laboring at the bedside.

While I was enjoying turkey and stuffing, many of you were at work.

True, I put in my years of doing it, but that only makes my gratitude to you deeper.

Recently, nurses and healthcare professionals were recognized for heroic work at a Gala at one of our hospitals.

This week came not one, but two articles, from two of our other hospitals, of heroic work by our Healthcare members to deliver a baby in the parking lot and to care for people with compassion in the ED.

But also came the story of yet another one of our nurses being viscously assaulted.

Nurses and healthcare professionals will go out of their way to stop and help a patient (even after they have clocked out) and consider it just a part of the job.

They will be threatened and assaulted daily and just consider it part of the job.

They will be late getting home to family on a regular basis because all hell is breaking out at work and they just can’t in good conscious leave, and consider it part of the job.

Unfortunately, almost daily our nurses and heath professionals are also berated and disciplined by managers for the smallest of things, like punching a time clock 1 minute late, like briefly speaking to each other at the nurses station about an upcoming union meeting, like standing up for themselves, their colleagues, and their patients.

This cannot be part of the job.

Your dedication and commitment to our profession and our patients comes from deep within. If they take that from us, they have taken everything.

We deserve, and we must demand, the respect we are owed. 

Mostly, we must demand it of ourselves.

As nurses, we often cite the Nightingale Pledge. Others in healthcare cite similar pledges or creeds.

In them, we pledge to do everything in our power to elevate our professions and to be dedicated to our work and the welfare of those in our care.

At the core of this, at the core of safe staffing levels, of safety in the workplace, of the freedom to care, is a moral code that demands that we demand respect.

It will not be given to us freely, experience teaches us this.

We must and we will take it. 

In solidarity and love I thank you for your dedication my sisters and brothers.