Holding the Line
When our patients need us, we catch them. We’ll do the same for our country.
By Bonnie Castillo, RN
National Nurse magazine - July | August | September 2024 Issue
As nurses, we are used to working in the space between possible outcomes, where things could move toward healing or slip into disaster. Every single day, every single shift, we use all of our skills and all of our collective power to point our patients, our workplaces, and our communities toward care, health, and life — and away from death, illness, and the worship of corporate profit.
In that space between possibilities, we nurses are experts at holding the line. So as we head into the most consequential election of our lifetimes, I want you all to remember that we are made for this moment.
NNU has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. She has a proven track record of being pro-union, supporting the right to organize, supporting NNU-backed legislation, championing our patients’ right to make their own reproductive health care choices, and more.
We know that there is no perfect elected official. But we also see so clearly who has given us a seat at the table and listened — the way the Biden-Harris administration did on day one of their administration, while issuing an executive order to federal agencies to take swift action to protect the health and safety of workers during the pandemic. The administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued an emergency temporary standard on Covid, the first ETS in nearly 20 years, and even added NNU President Mary Turner, RN to their Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force.
In contrast, we remember all too well what nurses were facing in 2020 when Donald Trump was president. Four years ago, nurses across the United States were completely overwhelmed by the horrors of early Covid-19. Hospitals were overflowing, and patients, nurses, and other health care workers were dying at terrifying rates.
The Trump administration failed to take action to prevent and respond to this catastrophe. Trump refused to listen to nurses. Or doctors. Or science. He repeatedly ignored the danger and ridiculed the established science on how to deal with communicable diseases.
When we compare where we were four years ago to where we are today, to borrow a line from Harris’ recent campaign speeches, nurses know: “We’re not going back.”
We’re going to keep moving this country forward, with the candidate who will best listen to our demands. And make no mistake: We never have and we never will waiver on our demands. NNU RNs are the warriors holding the line on all the issues that matter to nurses and our patients — including guarding against the potential for our public health and safety wins to be yanked away, and for our democracy to fall on its back.
We already have nurses working in states where reproductive rights have been rolled back to pre-Roe times, leaving our patients at risk of illness, medical complications, and death — while we nurses are paralyzed by legal issues, blocked from providing the lifesaving care our patients deserve. As nurses, we’re all about prevention. So we do not want to spend the next four years fighting just to regain protections we’ve already won.
Union nurses will always do everything in our power to steer this country in the direction that best supports public health and safety. Right now, that means we’re not only going to refuse to roll backward one bit; we’re going to continue our march ahead, using care as our North Star. We’re demanding strong workplace protections on everything from artificial intelligence in health care, to safe staffing and workplace violence.
We’re demanding strong social protections, including the right to join a union, the right of all people to lifesaving health care, and the right of all people to live in a clean, safe environment free of bigotry and hate.
We’re organizing in our workplaces and our communities, and we won’t stop until every nurse across this country has the protections of a union. We’re uniting with all working people in this rising labor movement.
The line we’re holding is a line of linked arms — mine through yours, yours through your patients’, your patients’ through their families’, their families through their communities’, and on and on, in unbreakable solidarity.
And our history has shown us that when union nurses hold that tightly to our vision, nothing can make us concede, not even an inch. We can win a society centered around care and health. It’s time. In this election, and every day after, I very much look forward to fighting by your side for a world shaped by nurses’ values.
Bonnie Castillo, RN is executive director of National Nurses United.