Letter from Our President

The Union we created together, through hard work, a guiding sense of mission, and sheer force of will, is 25 this year! And I am so proud of who we’ve become.

Twenty-five years ago this year, when the nurses who created PASNAP left other Unions to form this one, we had a vision for the kind of Union we wanted to create and be a part of – a Union that would focus on and fight for patient care and those who provide it, whether those caregivers were PASNAP members or not. A Union that would be composed of very strong, independent Locals, each with their own board and bylaws. 

It’s this internal structure – one that isn’t all that normal in the labor movement – that keeps Locals organized, engaged and ready to fight. 

PASNAP’s founding members understood that PASNAP needed to be a real Union – one whose power comes from collective action and bargaining and what we’re able to win from our employers. This little bit of early PASNAP history is important for the foundational understanding of who we are as a Union and what we did during our early years: We organized, built power and strength within each of our locals, and then we transformed our bad existing contracts into strong ones, building power and recognition and collecting more Locals along the way.

This is what we did then. It is what we are doing now. And it will be our path forward over PASNAP’s next 25 years. 

We started with eight Locals: 

• the Crozer Chester Nurses Association

• the Temple University Hospital Nurses Association

• the Wyoming Valley Nurses Association at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital

• the Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital Nurses Association

• the Nurses Association of Lower Bucks Hospital

• the Suburban General Nurses Association

• the Brooke Glen Nurses Association

• the Jeannette Professional Nurses Association – the only hospital/Local that no longer exists 

We now have 39. But our structure and values have not changed.

Fighting is hard. The struggle is hard. But access to health care, patient-centered health care, and excellence in health care is still a fight, and PASNAP is still fighting.