China Nursing Degree: August 2009

How is the living condition of filipino workers, especially nurses, in china?
the concept is about the situation filipino nurses have working in China; the relationship between chinese and filipino people; and the recreation they have in spare times, their meeting places and influences.
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SAN FRANCISCO (8/5/96) - When Joanne Bunuan applied to attend the Organizing Institute, and began the odyssey which led to her current work as a union organizer, she didn't realize that she was following a long tradition among Filipinos. "I was in college at the University of Massachusetts," she remembers. "I wasn't an activist, but I had radical ideas. I knew I wanted to be involved in social change, but I didn't really know much about the labor movement." An adviser urged her to investigate the Organizing Institute, set up by the AFL- CIO to recruit young people as union organizers. To her surprise, she passed the initial evaluation, and was sent to work on a union organizing drive in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The experience not only demonstrated her abilities, but convinced Bunuan herself that she had something to contribute. "Seeing the way many workers live in this country shook me up," she remembers. "I saw the racism dividing Asian, Latino, African-American and white workers. I thought, I can do something about this." She did do something. Today, she's an experienced union organizer for the Laborers' Union, criss-crossing the midwest. She brings the union's message to workers in chicken and turkey processing plants, who work in dangerous conditions at some of the country's lowest wages. Joanne Bunuan, born in Quezon City in 1973, followed the footsteps of the original pioneers, who left the Philippines in the 1920s to find a new life in America. They became a radical generation, and set a pattern of labor involvement still characteristic of the Filipino community. Today, Filipinos are active in all levels of American unions. They are worker-activists in factories and offices, organizers like Bunuan, and elected union officers. They have helped to establish enduring links between labor organizations and the Filipino community as a whole. "The manongs who came in the 1920s were children of colonialism," Abba Ramos, a veteran organizer in the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, says. "They were radicalized, because they compared the ideals of the U.S. constitution, which they were taught in the islands, and of the Filipinos' own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found here." The contributions of that generation to the larger U.S. labor movement are hard to underestimate. Leaders like Philip Veracruz, Larry Itliong and Pete Velasco organized strikes of California grape pickers through the 1950s and early 60s. Their work culminated in the great grape strike of 1965, when the United Farm Workers of America was born. Ernie Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas organized the Filipino workers who made the long and dangerous voyage every year to isolated salmon canneries in Alaska. Seattle's well-known Local 37 was the fruit of their efforts. Carlos Bulosan, who chronicled their labor organizing efforts in California fields, expressed the idealism of that generation. "America is not a land of one race or one class of men," he wrote in his novel, America Is In The Heart. "We are all Americans who have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers." At a time when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony, Bulosan declared that "America is not bound by geographical lattitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world." Ramos is one of the first children of that generation - sons and daughters of the first immigrants. His mother and father worked on Hawaii's giant sugar plantations in the late 1930s and 40s, when unionism was in the air. "It was an apartheid style of life," he remembers, "where workers were held hostage to the mill owners." Hawaii was swept by union organizing drives during those years, which made the ILWU the most powerful political force in the islands. "The union revolutionized the whole democratic process," Ramos explains. "Before sugar workers had a union, five families ran everything. Afterwards, every politician who wanted to run for office had to come talk to the workers, and their union decided who got elected." Ramos was one of the first children of sugar workers to attend the University of Hawaii. On graduation, he got a job in a non-union hotel, the King Kamehameha, hoping to help workers organize. Ramos listened to Filipino ILWU leaders. "I admired them. They had the power to stand up to the boss. They told me, if you want to be an organizer, show us what you can do. Go into the workplace and unite your fellow workers." Ramos spent his life working for his union, the ILWU. "Filipino workers," he says, "are often still on the bottom. We make the beds. We work in the restaurants, the electronics plants, and the fields. We need to accept the fact we are a working-class community. If we want to advance, we have to unite with other workers like us. That's what we learned in Hawaii." Filipino labor activists not only organized unions, but fought to make them clean and democratic, responsive to the needs of their members. Seattle's ILWU Local 37 fell into the hands of racketeers in the 1950s and 60s. Union leaders sold jobs in the union hall, and ran gambling operations to fleece workers in Alaska. Meanwhile, bad conditions in the remote canneries went unchallenged. In 1977, Richard Gurtiza, just out of college, got a dispatch to Alaska. "I found segregated housing and mess halls," he remembers, "and discrimination against Filipinos in promotions and jobs. We had no upward mobility, and lived in old and decrepit bunkhouses. I felt like I was living in the past." Two older friends of Gurtiza, Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, spearheaded a movement to challenge that discrimination, and filed suit against the canneries. They built a rank-and-file movement among the local's members, and were elected dispatcher and president. Then, in an incident which horrified the Filipino community up and down the Pacific coast, they were assasinated in the Seattle union hall soon after taking office in 1981. "I decided to help finish what they started," Gurtiza explains, "Gene and Silme started a movement which empowered union members. That was how we beat the people who killed them. Instead of scaring people into silence, more workers came forward." Gurtiza, a childhood friend of Viernes, became a union activist. He was elected to the local's executive board, and a shop steward in Alaska. Today he's the Regional Director of District 37 of the Inland Boatman's Union, ILWU, the old Local 37. Cleaning up the union made it a better representative for workers. "The old administration was more like a company union," he says. "Our concern, first and foremost, is to represent the interests of the rank-and-file. We follow the decisions they make, regardless of what the company says." Local 37 has been an institution in Seattle's International District for decades, and provides important services to the community. It helps with tax returns and sponsors Filipino youth activities. Many other organizations meet in its hall, and the local participates in coalitions on community issues like immigrant rights. "We're here, not just to provide employment opportunity," Gurtiza says, "but to play a role in the community. Our responsibility is to represent all our members, Filipinos and non- Filipinos alike, so we're not a Filipino union. We're a union with many Filipino members, in the Filipino community." Luisa Blue, now an organizing coordinator for the Service Employees International Union, also began her union activism in a movement to make her union more responsive to issues in the broader community. "I grew up wanting to fight for my rights, and for those of other people of color," she says. Like Gurtiza and Ramos, her parents were first-generation immigrants. They settled in San Francisco's low- income housing projects, where Blue became a community activist before she really knew what unions were. "We organized young people in San Francisco's Mission District," she remembers. "We fought for the right of young people to be out on the street without being harassed and beaten by the police. The war in Vietnam was going on, and we could see that young men of color were dying at a much higher rate. We organized around that issue as well." She became a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. With its large Filipino workforce, the hospital was a natural source of support for campaigns to defend the rights of immigrant nurses. Blue worked to defend Narciso and Perez, two Chicago nurses blamed for the deaths of patients. She fought other attacks on Filipino nurses as well, many of whom came from the Philippines on H-1 visas, and whose credentials were often challenged. "These nurses were extremely competent at their job," Blue remembers, "but they couldn't get their licenses." Blue brought these and other staffing issues to her union, Local 400 of the Service Employees. "My local was one of the few unions which supported immigrant nurses," she says. "I got active in the union so I could get it to take a position on these community issues." These fights won her a reputation as a defender of nurses' rights, and she was elected to the union's executive board. There she campaigned to change the union's leadership, which didn't reflect its membership with large numbers of women and people of color. New leadership was ele
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Health official: China's nurse workforce surges, but shortage persists China had 1.54 million nurses as ofthe end of last year, up 240,000 from 2005, a senior health official said in Beijing on Monday. Health boards investigate housing of Filipino nurses Wednesday, 28 March 2001 17:22 A spokesman for the East Coast Health Board has said that the three health boards in the Dublin area are investigating the circumstances in which 50 Filipino nurses were houses in substandard accommodation for more than a week. The spokesman said that as soon as the health board became aware of the situation the nurses were moved to alternative accommodation. He said that foreign nurses employed in hospitals run by the health boards are provided with temporary accommodation for eight weeks after they arrive and are then helped to find permanent accommodation Ma Xiaowei, vice health minister, told a tele-conference that last year alone, 120,000 more nurses joined the workforce, the biggest increase ever. He said nurses accounted for 34 percent of China's medical workers. The quality of the nursing workforce was also being lifted, with 57.5 percent of those at 696 major hospitals nationwide having received junior college education or above, Ma quoted a survey as saying. However, the survey also found nurses faced many problems including a heavy workload and lack of protection of their rights, he said. In the surveyed hospitals, one nurse often cared for 10-14 patients and some cared for more than 30 patients, he said. "The shortage of nurses has increased their workload and led tobelow-standard service for patients," he said. Ma said a new regulation on nurses that took effect on Monday would better protect their rights as to salary and benefits.

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Can I continue my Nursing degree studies in China or Japan, to return to the States and get my license?
What about American colleges in China or Japan? I know there's a big one in Japan that offers Nursing but I still don't know. Seems like my major will be holding me back from studying abroad
Higher Education (University +) - 1 Answers
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Registered Nurse licenses are regulated by your state board of nursing. In most states, you must graduate from an school of nursing accredited by that state. If you graduate from a foreign school of nursing, you must meet that state's requirements for foreign educated nurses and then pass the NCLEX exam. Nursing is VERY different in China and I'm not sure it would prepare you well to pass the NCLEX in the US. Japanese nursing is more in line with US, but I'd check out the school carefully. The first thing you need to do is to go to the website for your state's board of nursing and see their regulations for foreign trained nurses and then compare that to the schools you are considering. I don't want to make it sound impossible because it isn't. Nurses from Ireland and the Philippines come here frequently and get a license, but usually after some kind of additional training course. Take care before studying abroad for a US license.

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