When workers come together in numbers, we have power to make change.

For the past 12 years, I’ve worked as a certified nursing assistant in Michigan nursing homes. I feel passionate about taking care of others. But I’m also sick and tired of being underpaid, underappreciated and understaffed. I’m tired of a revolving door of managers that doesn’t seem to care about their employees or residents.

Last year, I fell through the stairs at my home and suffered a huge injury. I had two meniscus tears and my knee was bone on bone. Nursing home jobs take a wear and tear on our bodies, especially when we’re short staffed. With a serious knee injury, there’s no way I could continue to go on working and putting so much stress on my body.

The management at the time approved my short-term disability. I started physical therapy, so that I could come back to work fully healed. But a short while later, HR called to inform me they had changed their decision and could no longer honor my leave of absence.

After five years at SKLD, always taking good care of my people, after countless days of working short and working through a deadly pandemic, I was fired by a phone call. I felt like I was being discarded like trash.

Not only did I lose my seniority, I lost my health insurance. Without it, I could no longer go through with the physical therapy that I desperately needed. When I came back to work months later, I had to completely start over as a new hire. Instead of accruing at the rate I had taken years to build up to, I had to work my way back up to receive a certain amount of paid time off (PTO) per month. I also had to wait six months before I was eligible to get health insurance back for myself and my son. Being a new employee also meant I had to shuffle from building to building to earn a permanent spot on a unit, even though I had worked on my previous unit for years. It was humiliating for me.

This isn’t just my story. All across the industry, nursing home workers are understaffed and overworked and feel disrespected by managers who seem to care more about profits than residents or workers.

There are shifts where I come on the floor and call lights are going off everywhere. No one was able to get to residents to get them changed or even to answer simple requests for water. When there aren’t enough hands on deck, it’s easy to fall behind.

Because many of our residents don’t have regular family visitors, they depend on us for human connection. All they want is a conversation — just a little laugh or attention — that would make their day so much better. But we’re stretched so thin, we can’t even give them an extra five minutes because we have to run to the next person.

After the last few years working the front lines of COVID, my co-workers and I knew that things were not going to get better on their own. People could either go on complaining quietly or take action together to demand the changes that we and our residents need.

This summer, for the first time in my life, I went on strike.

When I clocked out of my midnight shift at SKLD nursing home in Bloomfield Hills to join my co-workers on strike, I remember management, with their arms crossed, staring daggers at us. The atmosphere was tense. It felt a little scary, but I was determined.

After so many years of being underpaid, overworked and understaffed and watching the issues in my nursing home get worse, I felt excited to finally raise our voices and let the world know what we were going through behind closed doors and to demand our employer SKLD listen to and respect us. This day had been a long time coming. So I took a deep breath and walked out to a waiting crowd, chanting, “Come on out, we got your back!”

Since our strike, we’ve filed for union recognition and in September, we voted in an election and we won our union! I feel very excited and proud to be a part of such a historical moment. With a union, we can have our voices heard and our concerns met.

I hope seeing us take action to form a union will encourage nursing home workers at other facilities to take a stand to be heard, valued and appreciated — not only for themselves but for the residents that they go to work to care for on a daily basis.

Building a long term care system that works for all of us requires a bold investment in the health and wellbeing of our nation’s seniors and people with disabilities — AND the women-led workforce who deliver their care, who must have a chance to join a union and have a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Because when workers come together in numbers, we have power to make change.

Nicole Brazil is a certified nursing assistant in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Together with other workers in her union, SEIU Healthcare Michigan, Nicole is fighting for a union voice and respect so that every worker can take care of themselves while they take care of others — no matter who they are or where they live.