So I’m currently a travel nurse, and I’ve just signed a contract back at the old hospital I worked at for over 6 years. I was chatting with the manager before I started my first shift and he said something that really pissed me off. I had initially applied for a contract there about 3 months ago, and was almost immediately rejected. I found that odd since I worked there before, have a pretty impeccable resume, and every pediatric hospital is currently drowning. The manager let me know why I was initially rejected in that little chat. His exact words were, “So I know we’ve been dragging our feet on this and we initially rejected you several months ago. The reason was because you have a history of radicalizing staff against administration. We knew how vocal you are about your dislike for administration and management. You won’t be doing that again here will you?”
For reference I had tried to unionize the entire hospital system of over 5,000 nurses a few years ago, when I was still a staff nurse there. I had publicly posted every single high level administrators salaries, stock options, and net worth to every break room in the hospital. I had also disclosed the exact amount they were paying a union buster to come in, and how that compared to a $5/hr raise for every nurse. Needless to say I was hated by administration and left a few months after attempts to unionize failed and my schedule started getting messed with too often.
I brushed off his comment because this is my last contract before I take a staff nurse job elsewhere, and I didn’t feel like having to leave here and find a new contract. I really wanted to just lay into him about basically every issue I was fighting for as the main catalyst for forming a union. I wanted to chastise him for being one of the boot lickers to actively campaign against those efforts because he was vying for a management position. I honestly want to just go scorched earth and see if maybe now the nurses are ready to unionize and just be openly defiant of everything they say.