Activating members as mentors, mobilizers and organizers dominated the agenda of the 2006 AFT Healthcare Professional Issues Conference in Washington, D.C., March 23-26. This year's conference theme, "Every Member an Organizer," reflected the division's primary focus on organizing, with panel discussions and workshops on organizing opportunities, member mobilization, contract campaigns, building work-site 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. "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."

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 win the war and to grow and be vital, "all unions must have a culture of organizing and mobilizing—and it takes every member."

Cortese encouraged participants to get involved in the upcoming 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."

Attendees also heard from Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, who praised them as "a great group that understands organizing." Grassroots organizing "is what matters in politics," he said. "We are speaking to our neighbors about our values because when [Democrats] take back the House and Senate, we will do it on a campaign of values."

Fred Feinstein, former general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, discussed the pending NLRB decision that could limit nurses' right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Challenges such as this have sparked unions to seek new and creative forms of worker representation as well as efforts 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."

Earlier, the division kicked off its three-day conference with the release of the union's national survey highlighting the growing problem of injuries among healthcare workers caused by lifting patients.

"As health professionals we just accept injuries and chronic pain as occupational hazards," said Owley. "Now we are saying enough is enough."

(posted 03/23/06)