By: Mike Wiser, Iowa Staff Union
The 15-member Ohio Nurses Employee Association affiliated with the National Staff Organization in September, marking the first NSO affiliate expansion in at least a decade.
“The membership vote was unanimous,” said ONEA President Anne Mueller, whose staff union supports registered nurses and healthcare workers in the public and private sectors. “That was a sign that this was the right move.”
The union vote and subsequent Sept. 12 application acceptance by the NSO Executive Committee is the capstone of a year-long effort by the NSO’s Ad Hoc Organizing Committee. The committee, which included NSO members from Ohio, Vermont, Maryland, Illinois and Washington, DC, was charged with identifying and evaluating independent locals for possible NSO affiliation.
“We built a database of 15 questions we’d run through,” said Will Klatt, a UniServ director with the Ohio Professional Staff Organization, who co-chaired the ad hoc committee with Colleen O’Connell, a communications professional in the National Education Association Staff Organization.
Those questions helped the committee determine if prospective affiliates were existing independents or if they had a parent association, how much new organizing would have to be done, if missions matched and finances were in order or if there were exacerbating differences in size, scope, capacity or other issues.
Several potential affiliations didn’t make it past the mapping and questions phase, Klatt said, not to say they wouldn’t be served well by an affiliation, just not the NSO at this time.
“Generally speaking, staff workers are treated like (crap) and not treated like regular workers,” Klatt said. “We’ve done some of this work in Ohio and we know – like we all know – the more of us, the more coordinated we are, the better.”
Mueller said her staff union was looking for a national affiliation for about a year, but nothing quite clicked, until she spoke with NSO representatives.
“From early on we were welcomed by the organizing committee. It was clear early on that our missions aligned, that we believed in the same thing,” she said.
The ad hoc committee term expired, but its work and some of its members have been rolled into the standing NSO Organizing Committee which Klatt and O’Connell said “will work to build an active culture of solidarity and power within NSO and the staff union profession based on a belief that a powerful labor movement is only possible when that movement upholds its values at every level, starting with the workers who empower workers.”