Katharine Mieszkowski/The Bay Citizen

"Queen Meg" faces down protesters in front of the real Meg Whitman's house

ATHERTON — Some 1,000 nurses descended on oak-canopied Edge Road to march to Meg Whitman’s house and loudly declare their opposition to the former eBay CEO’s candidacy for governor. Shortly after noon on Thursday, buses packed with RNs rolled up while police from Atherton, Menlo Park, Burlingame, Redwood City and even the California Highway Patrol guarded neighboring streets in anticipation of the hordes of healthcare workers.

Nurses wearing scrubs streamed off of dozens of buses to make their house call, wielding signs that read “Nurses Say No to Whitman” and “Hey Meg... I Voted Why Didn’t You?”

Martha Kuhl, the treasurer of the California Nurses Association, the union that organized the march, said she’s worried about what Whitman’s governorship would mean for nurses’ overtime protections and meal and rest breaks. “Who wants a nurse forced to work overtime, who is tired and hungry and worried about her family?” said Kuhl, who has worked as a nurse for 29 years.

Malinda Markowitz, who has worked for as a nurse for 30 years at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, said that the nurses had come to Whitman’s home turf, since the candidate has rebuffed an invitation to an unscripted public forum with the nurses. “We had to come to her since she has refused our offer to come to talk to us.”

The most sacred issue for these healthcare workers is California’s patient-nurse staffing ratios, which Gov. Schwarzenegger tried — and failed — to raise in 2005, after facing vigorous protests by nurses statewide. While Whitman’s campaign says in a website dubbed Truth for Nurses that she supports the current ratios 100 percent, Markowitz, who is co-president of the union, said that she doesn’t trust Whitman to keep her word.

“We question her integrity because she lied about the spat she had with one of her employees at eBay. When it was exposed she had actually pushed somebody, then she changed her story,” she said. On the medical/surgical floor where Markowitz works, by law there can only be five patients for each nurse. In other states, a nurse in a similar setting might have as many as seven to 12 patients to care for.

The union, which has endorsed Jerry Brown, has been publicly tangling with Whitman, derisively dubbing her “Queen Meg” and backing a recent call by two eBay shareholders, one of whom is a spokesman for the union, for the company to release details about the altercation.

It’s from the now-infamous eBay incident that the nurses derived the slogan for Thursday’s rally: “Nurses Won’t Be Pushed Around,” read the banner that they marched behind. Whitman had angered the union by demanding the names and addresses of its 86,000 members — in order to communicate with them directly — and accusing union leaders of wasting members’ money on partisan politics.

Hear from the nurses and see a clip of their march in this video:

DeAnn McEwen, an intensive care nurse from Long Beach who is an officer of the union, marched carrying her two-year-old granddaughter Rebekah, who was wearing a pink T-shirt with the slogan “Nurse in Training” emblazoned on the back. The child’s mother dropped the toddler off with her grandmother for the rally, because she had to go to work at the LiveWell Medical Clinic in San Bruno, where she is a pediatric nurse practitioner.

McEwen said that Whitman’s plan to cut the state's workforce represents an attack on nurses: “She is demonizing public sector workers, including nurses, threatening to cut their benefits and lay them off. We know that is going to make our hospitals less safe for the patients we care for.”

As the stream of marchers chanting, “We are the nurses! Mighty, mighty nurses!” and “The Whitman attack we’re gonna beat, beat back!” made its way to Whitman’s house, the ralliers were met by a Whitman impersonator wearing pearls and a crown, flanked by two henchmen in tuxedos with beauty-queen sashes that read “Goldman Sachs.”

Two men dressed as uniformed servants bearing huge mail bags printed with the words “RN Mail Hand Delivered” collected hand-written cards for Whitman from the nurses. As a crowd gathered on the road in front of Whitman’s house, the nurses pointed their fingers at the regal Queen Meg figure and her tuxedoed henchmen, yelling: “Shame on you!”

In response to the protest, the Whitman campaign released a statement from Alice Hansen, a retired registered nurse who lives in Los Gatos, identified as a member of the newly formed “Nurses for Whitman Coalition.”

“The California Nurses Association is shamelessly misrepresenting a respected profession for partisan political gain and it’s a shame,” the statement said.