President Heather Smith reminds 1,000 participants UNA’s 40th year AGM that ‘nurses go forward, they never go back’

United Nurses of Alberta President Heather Smith looked back at the union’s beginning 40 years ago to find the qualities it will need in the future as she opened UNA’s 2017 annual general meeting Tuesday morning. 

Remember what striking UNA members said in 1988, she advised the close to 1,000 delegates, observers, guests, staff and others in the hall at Edmonton’s Expo Centre as the AGM opened yesterday morning. “Nurses’ work is never done – the fight goes on for what was won!”

UNA helped lead Alberta nurses to where they are today, Smith said, through the foresight and courage of our nurses in the past, and that responsibility for leadership is belongs to every generation of nurses.

The theme of her remarks was “at you side, on your side – a 40-year history of growth and advocacy,” Smith said. “‘At your side and on your side’ is in part about UNA as an organization – providing services and representation to members.

“But it is also about our leaders,” she emphasized. “Local Executives supporting and advocating for members in the workplace.”

But most of all, Smith declared, “it is about 40 years of nurses who have been at the bedside – and I use bedside in the broadest sense. 

“This is often in hospitals and long-term care facilities, but I also mean at the side of and on the side of patients, residents, clients and their families, whether that is in a facility, the home or a community setting.”

Nurses are advocates for safe care “at the very interface of care and services,” Smith said. Alberta nurses have been collectively advocating for social justice through UNA in Alberta, across Canada and internationally since the 1970s. 

“It has not always been an easy road to travel,” she remembered. “At every stage, it was achieved in the face of employers and governments that resisted change for nurses, even while society was changing.”

As a result, she said, “the birth of nurses’ unions in Canada in the 1970s was inevitable. Just as the Women’s Movement of the late 1960s and 70s gave rise to reforms on reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay and many other changes in society, nurses across Canada increasingly demanded recognition of our work, changes to our workplaces and meaningful terms and conditions of employment.”

That could happen because nurses were represented by a union “of and for staff nurses, not by nursing management.” Their contracts are negotiated “by a union, not a professional association.”

When UNA was formed, she said, “those were the days when a grocery store bag packer earned more than a Registered Nurse. I remember the words of President Margaret Ethier: We are not sisters of charity!” In UNA’s first collective agreement, which ran from 1978 to 1979, the starting wage was $6.66 per hour. The top hourly wage after six years for an RN was $7.96.

“We are very fortunate to have had strong leadership and courageous leaders in those difficult years,” Smith said. “We had to take action to achieve the Rand Formula – just to be assured dues to be able to do the work of representing nurses!”

That is why, as UNA and its members move forward, she said, they can proudly tell Albertans that they are not just at their side and on their side, but “we intend to stay there.”

“As I’ve told you many times before,” Smith concluded, “nurses go forward, they never go back!”