Star Tribune: Do Justice (Page 117)

NOTE: The post below was sent by the spouse of an MNA RN to the Star Tribune as a letter to the editor.

“Do justice.”

These words from Isaiah keep coming to me as I read your joint article in in today’s Star Tribune.

Do you feel your coverage has done justice to both sides?

Sadly, I don’t.  I freely admit, as the spouse of a 30 plus year MNA nurse, I have a side.  I proudly walked the picket line with her last month.  Which side are you on?  Can you truly say your coverage has been unbiased?

I believe unions, with all their flaws, are a vehicle for social justice, the primary way workers have a voice in the workplace and can stay in the middle class at a time when wealth is being dramatically redistributed upward.  I have read nothing about this by you.

It deeply saddens me to see such a strong anti-union bias in your reporting.  Your article today, which ends with the suggestion that MNA nurses who sincerely support safe staffing would vote against the contract suggested by their negotiating team, is the last in a continuing attempts to discredit the MNA.   Yet it is consistent with your coverage that in essence encouraged nurses to desert their union, with no mention of the ethical issues involved when someone turns his or her back on their colleagues and friends, letting others take the risk and then benefiting from whatever they gain – “wringing their bread from the sweat of other women’s faces”, to update Lincoln.

Do you think that the safe staffing issues raised so passionately by our nurses will disappear?  Don’t you think that, after three years of documenting every instance of unsafe staffing, the MNA will be in a much stronger position when the next contract is negotiated, to achieve safe staffing for the patients served by their nurses?  The safe staffing issue has been raised and widely publicized.  The struggle for patient care will be ongoing.  Contrary to your article today, it will certainly not fade away.  Anything but!

Finally, would you please publicize the salary, total benefits, bonuses, stock options etc. for the CEO’s and VPs of all fourteen metro hospitals and their parent companies?  With so much made of nurses’ salaries, isn’t this simply basic fairness?  Isn’t it also fair to publicize the fees received by the hospitals’ lead lawyer Mr. Dawson, his colleagues, and something of their anti-union history?  We need to know how our health care dollars are being used.   Finally, for full disclosure, wouldn’t it be right to publicize the tie between the CEO of your own paper and the board of Abbott Northwestern Hospital?

Of course, there are other metro media who can provide the public with this information, but I would like to first ask you to do justice.  It only seems fair.

Rev. Bob Griggs