Formation
The origins of the United Nurses & Allied Professionals (UNAP) date back to the early 1970s, when Registered Nurses at several health care facilities in Rhode Island organized a union under the auspices of the Rhode Island State Nurses Association (RISNA). IN 1978, RISNA decided to relinquish its collective bargaining functions and encouraged its collective bargaining units to join with another union. After interviewing several unions, the roughly 400 former RISNA members chose to affiliate with the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (FNHP) of the American Federation of Teachers, and its state affiliate, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers (RIFT).
Between 1978 and 1998, the FNHP successfully organized RNs and other health care workers at Memorial Hospital, Woonsocket Hospital (now Landmark Medical Center), Westerly Hospital, RI Hospital, and Fatima Hospital, bringing the RIFT’s total health membership to 3,500. Inspired by the energy of a rapidly growing union, and the urgency of a rapidly changing industry, the FNHP leaders approached the RIFT leadership with a proposal to organize their locals into a semi-autonomous health care division within the RIFT. When the RIFT rejected this option, the members of eight RIFT health care locals voted overwhelmingly to disaffiliate from the RIFT in order to concentrate their efforts and resources as an independent health care union. They called their new union the UNAP.
Not long after the formation of the UNAP, two chapters of an existing RIFT visiting nurse local also voted to leave the RIFT and join the UNAP. They were followed in 1999 by an AFT local at Brattleboro Retreat, a pyschiatric facility in Brattleboro, Vermont, and, soon after, by an AFT local of registered nurses at Copley Hospital in Vermont.
Read more about this topic: United Nurses And Allied Professionals
Famous quotes containing the word formation:
“I want you to consider this distinction as you go forward in life. Being male is not enough; being a man is a right to be earned and an honor to be cherished. I cannot tell you how to earn that right or deserve that honor. . . but I can tell you that the formation of your manhood must be a conscious act governed by the highest vision of the man you want to be.”
—Kent Nerburn (20th century)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist struggle. This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel “safe” ... must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses.”
—Bell (c. 1955)