Erin Oberson and Kelli Brennan Elected Co-Presidents of Nurses’ Union
Registered nurses Erin Oberson of Old Town and Kelli Brennan of Saco were recently elected as co-Presidents of the Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses United. The two union leaders succeed long-time MSNA President Cokie Giles. RN Meg Sinclair was elected Vice President and Janelle Crowley was elected secretary of the union.
“Our organization has grown and I think that the most effective way to represent our members is there to be two of us,” said Oberson. “Like today I went up to Houlton to support the nurses’ strike and I was able to come back in a day, but it would have been much longer for a nurse coming from Southern Maine.”
“We want to grow our union and Erin’s been holding it down up north for so long, but with the southern part of the state getting involved there are so many opportunities down here to bring in other hospitals down south. It just seemed to make sense to kind of like divide and conquer,” said Brennan.
Oberson has worked as a registered nurse for 25 years, which she says is “like 84 in people years.” She grew up splitting her time between Portland and Rangeley. After completing nursing school, she worked at Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. She then moved to North Carolina where she worked at Carolina's Medical Center, a major trauma center. Eventually, she moved back to Maine and started working at Eastern Maine Medical Center in 2008. She first became involved in her union about two and a half years after she started working at the hospital. The hospital announced three layoffs and her union steward and labor rep informed Oberson that she was one of them.
A few years later, she decided she wanted to become a shop steward after being targeted by a manager who didn’t like her for whatever reason. She was impressed to see how her steward defended her when she was called in for a disciplinary hearing. Since then, Oberson has been deeply involved in the Maine labor movement, serving as Vice President of the Eastern Maine Labor Council and being involved with the Maine AFL-CIO. For many years she has been involved supporting workers’ struggles, campaigns for pro-labor candidates and fighting for pro-labor legislation in Augusta and Washington. Oberson along with Nick Paquet (IBEW 1253), Jim Betts (MSEA-SEIU 1989), Tina Davidson, and Sarah Bigney McCabe were arrested while staging a sit-in at Senator Susan Collins’ office in 2017 over the Senator Collins' support for President Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich. In 2020, Oberson, her husband Andrew Brogden (IAFF 3106) and their children were presented with the Maine AFL-CIO Working Class Hero for working tirelessly to build a stronger, broader workers’ movement and for always making union business family business.
Kelli Brennan is originally from Malden, Massachusetts, but her grandmother was from Maine and she spent summers at the family’s camp in Canton. After getting her associate’s degree at Regis University and Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford, she moved to Georgia and worked as a bedside nurse in a stroke unit. After a number of reorganizations and realignments and people getting fired, she ended up becoming director of the stroke program. She had never wanted to be in management, but she went on to become an interim director of the interventional radiology and neurosciences department following a billing error that resulted in the hospital having to repay $30 million in over-billing. Massive cuts needed to be made while she was leading the department. She said she finally had enough of working in Georgia when the COVID 19 pandemic hit in early 2020.
“COVID was the final straw,” said Brennan. “I really wasn't into politics much before, but watching Trump every day downplaying the pandemic and then being a nurse in Georgia and we had the refrigerator trucks outside [for the bodies of COVID patients]. We were reusing the same masks for two weeks.”
Her anger at the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic inspired her to get involved in the US Senate campaigns for John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who later won their elections. She served as a ballot observer for a recount for Warnock. Having had enough of Georgia, she decided to go back to being a bedside nurse and move to Maine where she had enjoyed so many visits as a child. She stayed in Georgia just long enough to see two anti-labor US Senators defeated.
Brennan arrived at Maine Medical Center in the middle of the nurses' contentious union drive, but she hadn’t worked there long enough to vote in the election. Her unit was very pro-management because they had a good relationship with their supervisors. Brennan immediately noticed how much better the working conditions were in the Maine hospital compared to where she worked in Georgia, but she also saw what happened when hospitals became massive corporate conglomerates and put profits over patients.
“I saw that happen in Georgia and then I came to Maine to work at the bedside and saw fairly decent conditions,” she said. “I thought we needed to lock these conditions in because if any one of these CEOs decides to leave and somebody comes up from the south, they’re going to bring their bad southern health care policies with them.”
As a former member of management, Brennan said she felt comfortable stepping up in support of the union and telling her manager and director that she would be distributing pro-union information to the rest of the staff in her unit. Now out of 75 nurses in her unit, only one is not a dues paying member because they have experienced the benefits of their union contract.
“Even before we finalized this last contract, older senior nurses who had a devotion to the hospital were very supportive of the union,” Brennan said. “They see what we did and they saw how it worked. People who might have been anti-union before really appreciate what we’ve accomplished and it has brought us together.”
She said while the nurses sometimes have heated disputes with management at the bargaining table, most units have very good relationships with their immediate supervisors. She said even supervisors have experienced the benefits of having a unionized hospital. They appreciate that nurses finally have guaranteed lunch breaks and that they are allowed to hire additional staff. She said supervisors also love it when nurses file Assignment Despite Objections (ADOs) when they are given unsafe patient assignments due to severe short staffing, dangerous patient-to-nurse ratios, or a lack of proper resources.
Oberson said that now that the contracts with Maine Med, EMMC and Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent have been settled, there’s a lot of energy to do some more nurse organizing. Her priorities as President include making sure each nurse unit at unionized health care facilities are made aware of each other struggles.
“It's always about patient safety, nurse safety and working conditions," she said. "And I think that understanding that we're all in this together in one way or another is a way to keep things really cohesive and strong.”
Brennan said nurses would continue to fight closures of rural hospitals and birthing units. She noted that corporatized health care is an ever-increasing threat to quality patient care in Maine, noting that a California health care conglomerate just purchased Central Maine Health Care in Lewiston.
“I'm kind of looking at opportunities to grow our union density down in the southern region so nurses at other hospitals can be as strong as they are up north,” said Brennan. “I think getting 21 percent raises over three years in our contract gives us momentum to go out and help everybody else. We can focus our energies and help to do the same thing with other groups and organizations.”
In addition, nurses will continue to pressure Maine Med to cancel its contract with Palantir due to its collaboration with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has targeted the predominantly immigrant house keeping staff at the hospital. Brennan said nurses will continue to press the hospital to recognize that there is a nurse retention program, not a nursing shortage. If the hospital improves patient safety and working conditions, she said, more nurses will stay.