Nurses Are Not the Enemy. Neither Is Management.

Sometimes vulnerability lets us see the person beyond the role.

Lying in a hospital bed after major surgery is a humbling experience.

There are tubes coming out of you. People are helping you with things you normally do for yourself. Your body is vulnerable. Your dignity feels negotiable. You are tired, sore, exposed, and dependent on the kindness and competence of strangers.

And in that space, I saw nurses in a way I had not seen them before.

For years, as a mediator, nurses have been the bread and butter of my work. I have sat across from them in bargaining. I have watched them fight over wages, staffing, schedules, mandatory overtime, patient ratios, benefits, safety, and respect.

And let me be clear: nurses can be a pain in the ass at the table.

They can be stubborn. They can be angry. They can be unyielding. They can make management crazy. They can make mediators crazy too.

But lying in that hospital bed, I was not seeing nurses in conflict.

I was seeing them in service.

The nurse who will not move an inch at the bargaining table may be the same nurse who gently helps a frightened patient wash her hair at 2 a.m.

The nurse arguing over staffing language may be the same nurse who notices a patient’s pain before the patient says a word.

The nurse filing a grievance may be the same nurse holding someone’s hand while they cry.

Both versions are true.

That is the part we often miss in labor relations. We meet people inside the conflict, and then we mistake the conflict version of them for the whole person.

We do it with nurses.

We do it with administrators.

We do it with union representatives.

We do it with managers.

We take the behavior we see across the table and turn it into identity.

“They are difficult.”

“They do not care.”

“They are unreasonable.”

“They are only protecting themselves.”

“They are the problem.”

But most of the time, people are not the problem. The system is. The pressure is. The history is. The fear is. The lack of trust is. The competing obligations are.

This is especially true in healthcare, where the stakes are not abstract.

For nurses, staffing is not just contract language. It is whether they can provide safe care without breaking themselves in the process.

For administrators, budgets are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are real constraints, competing demands, regulatory pressures, operational realities, and responsibility for keeping the institution functioning.

That does not mean everyone is right.

It does not mean every position is reasonable.

It does not mean harm should be excused.

It means we have to stop flattening people into the role they occupy in the dispute.

Nurses are not the enemy.

Administration is not the enemy.

The enemy is the belief that one side must be morally deficient for the other side to have a legitimate concern.

In the hospital, the nurses who cared for me were kind, gentle, nonjudgmental, and deeply professional. They went out of their way to make me feel safe when I was vulnerable. That kind of care is not small. It is not soft. It is not incidental.

It is skill.

It is discipline.

It is humanity in action.

And it reminded me of something I know but still need to relearn in different ways: people remember how they were treated when they were scared, angry, ashamed, uncertain, or overwhelmed.

That is true in a hospital room.

It is also true in mediation.

Most people will not remember every word of a proposal. They will not remember every caucus note. They will not remember the exact phrasing of an opening statement.

But they will remember whether they felt dismissed.

They will remember whether they felt humiliated.

They will remember whether they felt heard.

They will remember whether someone in the room saw the human being underneath the position.

That does not mean we avoid hard conversations. Quite the opposite.

The more difficult the conversation, the more we need to resist the temptation to turn people into villains.

Because once the other side becomes the enemy, curiosity disappears. Listening disappears. Problem-solving disappears.

And when that happens, the table stops being a place where people work through conflict and becomes a place where they perform certainty.

Maybe what we need is more compassion and more understanding.

Less obsession with who is right or wrong.

More willingness to ask: what can we do together?

That does not mean abandoning principles. It does not mean pretending the conflict is not real. It does not mean ignoring harm, power, or accountability.

It means remembering that resolution rarely begins with proving the other side wrong.

It begins when someone is willing to listen long enough to understand what the conflict is really asking of us.

I have sat with unions long enough to know they are not always saints.

I have sat with management long enough to know they are not always villains.

And now, after lying in a hospital bed being cared for by the very profession I have so often met across the table, I am reminded again:

The person across from us is almost always more than the role they are playing in the conflict.

If we forget that, we lose access to the very thing that makes resolution possible.

Humanity.