Bay Area BusinessWoman
Published: March, 2007
March 2007 Vol. 14 No. 6
Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association (CNA), has been hailed as the “The Woman who met the Terminator’s match.” For the last 13 years, she has run the boisterous, nearly all female 70,000-member union that neutralizes its opponents, including actor-turned governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with creative direct action, alliance building and media manipulation.
Under DeMoro’s helm, the CNA has tripled in size, and has become a major political player in the state. Now it’s taking its influence across the country, organizing RNs in 40 states and pushing for legislation making federally funded healthcare available for everyone.
DeMoro believes that she benefited from the courage of some strong and influential women in a period of time, the late ’60s and early ’70s when the country was questioning its political priorities and woman were demanding their rightful place at the table — giving her the capacity to fight and advocate for the too often undervalued women in the nursing profession.
After earning her degree in Women’s Studies from Southern Illinois University, DeMoro moved to Santa Barbara where she started working toward a PhD in sociology. But she abandoned her studies to cut her teeth in union organizing.
Fast-forward 20 years to the early ’90s when each nurse in California had ten or twelve patients and service was so terrible that some were calling 911 from their hospital beds. That’s when DeMoro took over the reigns of the nurses’ union and started pushing for a minimum nurse-to patient ratio.
She launched a huge 10-year fight against fierce opposition from powerful HMOs that climaxed with the enactment of the nation’s first nurse-to-patient safety law. Then Schwarzenegger, elected in November 2004, almost immediately tried to scrap the law. In response, DeMoro targeted Schwarzenegger in one of the most aggressive and colorful labor campaigns in decades.
The nurses also took the lead in forming a coalition with California’s other powerful unions enraged over Schwarzenegger’s call for a special election in November 2005 which featured ballot initiatives that would curtail their power. Schwarzenegger’s union-taming initiatives went down to massive defeat, and days later his administration quietly dropped its court battle to block the nurse-patient ratio law.
DeMoro and the CNA are not only grassroots heroes in California. Nurses nationwide are asking DeMoro for help in challenging the growing power of corporate hospital chains and other states’ anti-worker initiatives.
What’s the most important thing you learned in school — or in the “school of hard knocks?”
History does not reward timidity in bringing about social justice to the health care arena.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Fighting the misbegotten notion that our current health care un-system can be repaired through piece meal incrementalism of profit-based private health insurance.
What’s your favorite quotation?
“If there is no struggle there is no progress — power concedes nothing without a demand. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted.” — Frederick Douglass.
What achievement are you most proud of?
Playing a significant part in the reconceptualization of the lost historic role of the RN from bedside patient advocate to social advocate.
What’s your advice to girls and/or women who are interested in the Health Care profession?
Now is the singularly best historical moment to enter the profession and demonstrate that advocating for one’s patients is inseparable from advocating for social justice.
What does it take to be an effective activist for change?
To rebel against “conventional wisdom” that maintains the ‘dynamic status quo,’ to find courage to follow your beliefs to advocate for change when it seems hopeless. To be collective, creative, inclusive — and relentless.
