Queen Meg, a blond crown-wearing woman
hired by the California Nurses Association, will greet Republican
gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman at some campaign stops in coming
weeks.
California Nurses Association hired the
blond, crown-wearing woman, Whitman look-alike to spoof what the
union thinks as the candidate's regal attitudes toward everyday
citizens and patients, especially low-income women.
Oakland-based California Nurses Association is one of the most
influential unions in the United States, this is due to its advocacy
for patient protections. It is also heading the fight to defeat the
former CEO of eBay, Whitman, who has already spent $104 million of
her own money on the campaign.
Whitman condemns a bloated public sector for the state's $20
billion budget deficit. To close the gap, she plans to bump off
40,000 state jobs and change the pension system by augmenting the
retirement age, prolonging the waiting period for government workers
to qualify for pension benefits and obligating them to contribute a
higher percentage of their incomes to the plans.
"Changing the pension system is unfair to the thousands of
diligent state workers who are counting on it to put food on the
table during retirement," said Kuhl, a nurse for 29 years.
The union is also afraid Whitman will remove workplace protections
such as meals, rest breaks, and staffing requirement in hospitals. In
a lot of states, a nurse on a medical-surgical unit may take care of
as many as a dozen patients. California provides one nurse for every
five patients.
California Nurses Association, an
86,000-member union, is using street theater and strategically-placed
ads to elect California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the Democratic
nominee in the Nov. 2 election. The association supports the
candidacy of Brown because he was the one who implemented the
nation's first staffing ratios for intensive care units when he was
governor from 1975 to 1983. He also approved a bill giving registered
nurses and other employees of the University of California collective
bargaining rights, which resulted to increases in salaries and
benefits for nurses in the private as well as public sector.
In a phone interview, Martha Kuhl, treasurer of the California
Nurses Association, said, "Whitman's agenda clearly represents
her experience as a CEO of a corporation that sent 40 percent of its
jobs overseas, and as a board member of Goldman Sachs, an investment
bank that was bailed out by taxpayers."
California voters found Whitman leading, in a Sept. 6 Rasmussen
Reports telephone survey, with 48 percent support. Brown on the other
hand had 45 percent while 3 percent favoring other candidates and 4
percent still undecided.
The Whitman team got back by attacking the "radical
leadership" of Rose Ann DeMoro, an executive director and a
former Teamster organizer, of exhausting thousands of dollars on the
stunt. Whitman also alleged that many nurses were forced to use their
sick days to join in the political rall, which the nurses themselves
denied.
To mount an $8 million media campaign this summer, the California
Nurses Association joined other unions. The campaign included ads on
a Spanish radio station, highlighting Whitman's disapproval to
amnesty sanctions. Latinos represent about 20 percent of the
electorate.
Whitman has already spent $24 million on ads responding to the
unions, Brown had no media expenses, which allowed him to save his
campaign chest of $19.4 million for the post-Labor Day campaign.
More than 3,000 members of the California Nurses Association
assembled at the state's capital in Sacramento to protest Whitman's
lack of political engagement on Aug. 26--the 90th anniversary of
women's suffrage. Dressed in straw hats and long skirts from the
1920s, the nurses brandished their banners announcing "women
vote for female candidates who also vote."
If elected, Whitman, a billionaire graduate of the Harvard
Business School, would be the first female governor of California.
In 2009, only eight states had female governors.