This year’s meeting, “Every Member an Organizer,” included a panel discussion and workshops on organizing opportunities, member mobilization, contract campaigns, building networks of activists, and more.

“Organizing is very different from what it used to be,” Candice Owley, AFT Healthcare’s program and policy chair and an AFT vice president, told hundreds of participants at the opening session in Washington, D.C. “We are no longer dealing with small community hospitals. Today we are taking on huge corporate systems who have decided that healthcare is a commodity to be sold. You are at the frontlines of the battle to restore healthcare to the right that it should be.”

By focusing on organizing, the union is “looking for ways to change the dynamic,” said Owley. “When you look at every measure, every survey, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of workers want a union,” but anti-union forces are keeping collective action at bay, she said.

Although all of the AFT’s constituencies face anti-union, anti-worker employers and politicians, said AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese in her keynote address, “I don’t have to tell you that the fight is particularly vicious in the private sector, where most of you work.” To grow, thrive and win, “all unions must have a culture of organizing and mobilizing—and it takes every member.”

Cortese encouraged participants to get involved in the general elections this fall. “We can make a difference in these elections,” she said. “Workers have the opportunity to look at every race, and not just at the national and state level. There is no office too small to win.”

Owley reminded attendees that the labor movment as a whole is under attack, and that as union members, “We all have to care about what’s happening to unions. We have to care about the loss of pensions, healthcare benefits. It’s critical that we stand together with all of our brothers and sisters who are under attack. It’s important for us to remember the basic principles of solidarity because if unions are lost, the whole country will suffer.”

Owley pointed to the powerful role union members play in promoting democratic values by voting, lobbying Congress and backing legislation that benefits everyone. “We are the special interest of the nation,” she said.

The message about solidarity really hit home for first-time attendee Andrea Gavin, a nurse with the Visiting Nurse Services in Westchester, N.Y., and vice president of the Westchester Federation of Visiting Nurses.

She says being at the conference “cemented” her belief that unions are important.

“If we don’t make others understand why unions are necessary, we are going to lose them,” said Gavin, who plans to use what she learned to get her members more involved. “There are things we can do to make the union stronger—not just our union but other unions as well.”

Breaking old patterns

Fred Feinstein, former general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, discussed a pending NLRB decision that could limit nurses’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining.

“This is a difficult and exciting time in the labor movement. The challenges are daunting,” said Feinstein, pointing to a decline in union membership, the changing structure of the workplace, and President Bush's subversion of the National Labor Relations Act by appointing board members hostile to labor.

Challenges like these have sparked activists to revitalize the union movement, said Feinstein. Unions like AFT Healthcare, he added, “are rising to the challenge by breaking the old patterns of organizing.”

Ann Twomey, president of Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE) in New Jersey, told attendees, “It’s important to keep in mind that fear is contagious, but so is confidence. Regardless of what happens at the labor board, we have never relied on the board to be our savior or solution. We must rely on ourselves.”

During a panel discussion on organizing, Larry Lipschultz, organizing director for New Jersey’s Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), warned that the upcoming NLRB decision ccould reach beyond nurses and affect leaders in several industries.

“We cannot operate as if it is business as usual because it is not,” said Lipschultz. “We take a serious look at organizing and figure out how to use our resources to demand change.” And, he added, unions must make certain that employers know the costs of attacking the union.

Panelist and labor consultant Valerie Ervin observed that activists have a big job ahead.

“Employers are on the offensive because they can, and they are winning because they can,” said Ervin, a former union organizer. “We have to begin to look outside the bubble of the labor movement and look at it in a much broader context if we are going to win. We can’t keep the struggle inside the bubble.”

“We should be talking to our neighbors, families, friends about these issues we care about, such as the loss of pensions, lack of healthcare,” added Ervin. “It’s up to us to speak for those who have no voice.”