Vice President

Joan Craft Vice President

Hawaii's Joan Craft was elected vice president of the United American Nurses in March 2008. Craft, a 15-year-veteran nurse who currently works in a critical care unit at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, helped lead the Hawaii Nurses Association's affiliation with the UAN in 2005.

Craft is active in state and local union activities as well. She serves as vice president of the HNA and holds a labor seat on the Hawaii State Center for Nursing's Advisory Board, where she brings the issues important to organized staff nurses to the attention of the state's nursing community.

As a steward in her local bargaining unit and chair of the HNA collective bargaining committee, Craft is committed to improving working conditions for nurses from the grassroots level up. Together with other staff nurses at Queen's, in 2002 Craft helped lead a strike of the 900 RNs at the facility to protect the nurses' pension plan. She notes that, through her participation in the strike, she "evolved from a regular dues-paying member with only the vision and interests of my unit into a union sister of 900 at my facility, 4,000 in the state of Hawaii and thousands across the nation."