Profession or Union: Who Will Call the Shots?

Authors

  • Joan M Gilchrist

Abstract

TODAY some of the most crucial problems concerning the character of nursing practice are being solved by unions, by hospital associations and by government. Professional or otherwise, unions conceive the answers to these problems to be amenable to inflexible, rigid and isolated statements of what "each side" in negotiations with employers will or will not do under certain similarly inflexible, rigid and isolated circumstances. The same doc of solution is often sought by professional associations attempting to give people definite predetermined "guidelines" upon which the solution to professional problems in work situations are to be based. What are the logical consequences of this for nursing? Neither union nor professional association individually or in concert, as each is presently constituted, appear to be capable of reversing the insidious erosion of the individual and collective nurse's power in her job relationships, a crucial requirement of a professional service. Who then is to call the shots? This paper presents some aspects of the situation to be considered in deliberations among nurses as they answer this question.

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Published

1969-04-13

Issue

Section

Articles