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By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON—Bringing 160 pairs of empty nurses’ shoes to memorialize colleagues lost to the coronavirus pandemic, National Nurses United members descended on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress order their bosses to provide them with personal protective equipment (PPE) as part of the next economic stimulus law.
The nurses carefully arrayed the shoes on the Senate side of the building’s lawn—the same stretch of green where Black Lives Matter campaigners stood with signs the day before urging senatorial passage of the same measure, the Heroes Act. Then nurses held up pictures of dead colleagues.
With almost 200,000 registered nurse members, NNU is the largest registered nurses union in the U.S. In protecting both patients and nurses, it’s one of the most militant. And now the union has turned the lack of PPE into the big issue in organizing at least 1,600 registered nurses in western North Carolina’s biggest hospital, in Asheville.
Whether the NNU’s registered nurses or the BLM demonstrators will move the Republican U.S. Senate majority to defy its bosses—GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump—will be decided before August 8, in votes on the Heroes Act.
In March, the Democratic-run House passed its $3 trillion version of the measure, including NNU’s provision: ordering Trump’s OSHA to issue an emergency rule, to take effect now, forcing hospitals and nursing homes to develop and execute anti-virus protection plans....
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