Ambiguities of Political Consciousness Among Registered Nurses in British Columbia*

Hospital nurses, particularly Registered Nurses, differ from many other types of worker because they do sex-typed work and occupy an ambiguous social position. Nearly all of them are female employees subordinated to mainly male superiors; they are trained to see themselves as professionals but unable to exercise the degree of autonomy enjoyed by physicians and lawyers. This ambiguity has led to the co-existence of both nurses' unions and professional associations. These features of nurses' situations, as well as the intense involvement of the British Columbia Nurses' Union (BCNU) in the Operation Solidarity protest movement of 1983, led us to conduct a survey of the political activity and class consciousness of a sample of hospital Registered Nurses. In this paper we first justify the need to analyze nurses as participants in class and gender relations within capitalism, contending that they form a status group within the working class that is subject to specific contradictory pressures and involved in specific collective strategies in struggles with employers and the state. There follows an outline of the history of nurses' struggles in British Columbia and a brief discussion of their position within the changing class structure of the province and of their collective response to Social Credit restraint measures in 1983. We then report our findings from a survey of a sample of Registered Nurses at a large acutecare hospital in Victoria and conclude with comments on the contradictory consciousness of nurses and the potential role that they and other female workers can play in the province's future political development.