Moral Contention and Labor Conflict: Nurse Organizing and the Corporatization of Care

• In Event: 036 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Worker and Union Strategies and Structures: The United State in an International Context

Abstract

Scholars of labor conflict have found that strikes are both less common and less efficacious than they once were. In response, many unions have come to rely on alternative forms of symbolic power centered on moral claims. This paper addresses this topic by examining the history of nurse organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unlike other groups of private sector workers, in recent decades nurses’ unions have grown. However, nurses’ organizations have historically been broadly ambivalent toward the strike. Nurses’ early organization within professional associations shaped how they engaged in workplace-centered conflict; this organizational history and ongoing collective claims to professional status kept nurses from striking for their first two decades of collective bargaining, even as many nurses themselves were becoming increasingly militant. I argue that the tensions, contradictions and compromises of the early era of nurse organizing—particularly the tension between “professional” patient-care obligations and the use of economic coercion—helped produce a set of practices that would prove helpful in later conflicts. Nurses unions’ deliberate mobilization of moral suasion and professional authority in the public sphere, originally intended as an alternative to the exercise of workplace power, became powerful symbolic tools during later confrontational strikes. These tools proved particularly potent during periods of declining public trust in corporate medicine.

Author

• Pablo U. Gaston, University of California, Berkeley