 My name is Amy Waters. I work at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I've been a nurse for 31 years and I've always worked in the South, either Florida or North Carolina. I'm also on our hospital's newly formed negotiating team to work on our first contract. For anyone on this webinar who doesn't live in the South to understand how deeply Southern workers are afraid of unionizing, it's instilled in us from our earliest working days that if we unionize, we could be fired, unions are bad. And so there's a deeply rooted fear against organizing union in the South. And at my particular hospital which has a little over 800 beds, we have about 1,800 bedside nurses. And our bargaining unit is the vast majority are Caucasian women. So Mission was a private community hospital. And in February of 2019, HCA, which is Healthcare Corporation of America, a for-profit entity bought the hospital February, 2019, promising us as bedside staff that we would see no real changes in our hospital. Any changes that might happen would be at an upper management level. It would be a very smooth transition, nothing to worry about. They lied to us about that. We immediately saw some pretty major changes at the bedside. For example, directly affecting me, they took away our our CNAs, which are our nursing assistants from all of the intensive care units. They also took away our secretaries. So as a nurse, I now only had to provide care for my patient, but I had no one to help me provide that care. And I had no one to do the phone calls, the scheduling of appointments. I had to do all of that myself as well. So in the spring of 2019, in May, a couple of the nurses that work on the adult floors of the hospital decided that they saw where this was going and that's the best way for us to have any chance of getting any say in what was happening. Our hospital was to form a union. And they contacted NNU, National Nurses United and began meeting secretly. They called it their book club. And they would hold meetings and an organizer moved into our area in either October or November of 2019. And we began to seriously organize. Up until then, it was purely word of mouth, very much undercover. By October, we had built significant momentum moving towards unization and had a very wide network across the entire hospital. In my division, in the maternal child division, we don't have it as bad as the adult units. And without these union meetings, we may never have known how bad it was. But we began to share stories with all of the nurses across the hospital and finding out what things were really like. In February of 2020, we got into a point where we started card signing. Our first day of signing cards, we got over 400 nurses committed to having a vote for a union. March 6th of this year, we filed for our election. We were very excited about that. And then the next week, COVID. So the hospital began busting us really hard and also worked behind the scenes to keep delaying our election, claiming COVID as a reason. We began having mandatory meetings with the union buster. Many of us as leaders signed up and attended as many of those meetings as we could get into trying to take over the meeting, pushing back at the union busters and trying to make the meetings pro-union. It was a lot of fun. Management began intimidating the staff. There were many illegal disciplines of nurses for rounding or discussing the union at work while they were there on their time off, by the way. So we began to push back against management. Early in the pandemic, nurses signed a petition demanding more PPE and training on how to use that PPE. In our trauma care unit, the manager quit after a march on the bus to demand a discipline be removed by one of their staff. The discipline was removed and then the manager quit. The hospital continued to cut staffing, making conditions more and more dangerous for both the patients and the staff. So we began using ADOs, which is an assignment despite objection form to document unsafe staffing and shifting the legal responsibility for that unsafe staffing onto the hospital. The hospital claimed that the union was divisive and they had a lot of paperwork handing out to the employees, telling them how divisive the union was and a third party and we didn't want it. And also in the press, they used that word a lot that the union was divisive. So we began holding collective actions and escalation campaigns to keep the nurses engaged and to show management and the community that we were united. We ended with a socially distanced press conference to blow the whistle on the catastrophic staffing conditions with over 80 nurses standing in front of the hospital socially distanced. With our press conference. And that was also the day that we found out we finally got our votes. The community in Asheville was very involved in our campaign once we went public. They realized their community hospital had changed, not for the better. And they realized that the nurses unionizing was probably the best way for us to get some control of our hospital back. They wore magnetic bumper stickers on their cars that said, we heart nurses at Mission Hospital. They had yard signs that said, we support the nurses at Mission Hospital, which obviously made us feel good and helped us have the strength to keep going in what was a very long campaign. Our local politicians in clergy were very vocal with their support for the nurses. Many of them came to our press conference. Management began to hold one-on-one meetings to intimidate nurses and lie about the union. We had tight leadership and close communication with our nurses to make sure they were prepared for these meetings and to support them if they were being pulled into the manager's office. Management continued to spread misinformation about the union. So we flied multiple times a week at both shift changes to make sure all of the nurses in the hospital were reached and to show that we were united and we were unafraid. Management tried to delay the election. They only tried, they were successful. They delayed our election for six months. Then after we had our hearings via Zoom, they claimed to the NLRB that they weren't valid and that they needed to be redone. So the nurses held an action to confront our CEO. We wore stickers that said HCA let us vote. We engaged nurses in the community in an email campaign to the CEO, demanding that HCA validate the hearing and stop delaying. The next day, HCA validated the hearing and sent an email to staff notifying us that they had done so. Nurses then began calling the NLRB Atlanta office, which was holding our vote, to demand a date for our vote. We finally got it. We had a mail-in vote and the votes to be counted on September 16th. We went into our election thinking that it would be a close victory, but all of our undecided nurses skewed very heavily yes and we ended up with a landslide victory. Now we are busy rallying our membership around our bargaining proposals, trying to build the power we need to win a great first contract. We are now the first private hospital in North Carolina with a union. And we are the largest newly formed union in the South since I believe the 1970s. Thank you.