Note: Registered Nurses Linda Hamilton, Bernadine Engeldorf and Jean Ross wrote this column for the “Labor Voices” featured in the October 2011 edition of The St. Paul Union Advocate. It also appears on the blog at www.nationalnursesunited.org.

From Madison to Wall Street, from St. Paul to Washington D.C., people are seeing nurses dressed in red scrubs, holding not a stethoscope but a megaphone. We are carrying signs. We are marching en masse. And we are raising our voices. This may seem unusual behavior for our profession, but in truth, our history is deeply rooted in social advocacy, as well as the bedside advocacy you’ve come to trust. We’re doing more because we must.

We are facing a crisis in our profession and in the realm in which it serves. Anger is building. We see it in the weary faces of our colleagues, hear it in the exasperated tone of our voices and feel it in the now-permanent clench of our jaws.

But we’ve recognized that if this is true for the majority of us, an insidious grand scheme is working. Wall Street power brokers are counting on us to assume the role of submissive, quiet caregivers who don’t question or protest. Read more…

Following the adjournment of the President’s Deficit Commission, National Nurses United, the nation’s largest professional nurses’ union, called on Congress to fully scrap the deeply flawed recommendations of the panel’s co-chairs, and move forward with the urgent actions that will protect America’s nurses and working families.Such a plan would start with a new economic program to put people back to work, a point made more pressing by today’s latest disastrous employment numbers, extending benefits for the unemployed which puts immediate money into the economy, and genuinely cutting healthcare costs, by expanding Medicare to cover all Americans.“We need a plan for everyone, not just Wall Street, the banks, and their champions in Washington who seem to dominate the political debate,” said Deborah Burger, RN, co-chair of the 160,000-member NNU. “Congress and the White House should stop focusing on the agenda of Wall Street and financiers which mischaracterizes causes of the deficit – the Bush tax cuts, the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the downturn in the economy – and advance the programs Americans need, such as stimulus spending.”“Nurses know that the ongoing explosion in healthcare costs is also a major source of the federal deficit, and the insecurity faced by millions of American families and patients,” said Burger. Read more…