Tufts Medical Center nurses
went back to work on Monday after launching the first Boston nurses’ strike in
more than three decades—to demand better patient-safety protections and more
competitive compensation. Despite the collective action, the roughly 1,200
nurses who walked out still face barriers to a satisfactory resolution.
On July 12, at least 1,200
Tufts nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) union,
waged a one-day strike after more than 30 bargaining sessions with the
hospital. Nurses in the bargaining unit told In These Times that major points
of contention included pensions and safe staffing.
Tufts hired 320 U.S. Nursing
Corp. temporary nurses, a travel nurse staffing agency based in Colorado, to
fill in. Rhonda Mann, director of communications for Tufts, said in a
statement, "The nurse staffing company that provides replacements required
Tufts to guarantee those nurses with five days of work.”
This claim was used to justify
management’s four-day lockout of nurses.
Beth Taglieri, 41, has been a
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nurse for 18 years, including four at
Tufts. She told In These Times that she was concerned about leaving her
patients with agency nurses during the strike. "They don't know our
system, and it's hard to know how they will treat your patients,” she said.
According to Taglieri, the
union has negotiated with the hospital administration in the past, but the two
sides were too far apart this time.
The union cites lower starting
wages and poor pension plans as the key barriers to Tufts’ retention of nurses
after they are trained. Tufts nurses make between $32.50-$63.00 per hour,
depending on experience. In contrast, top-tier nurses at Boston’s highest
paying hospital make $70.27.
The nurses recommended a
multi-employer benefit plan that they say could save Tufts $96 million to
spend on staffing and pensions. But the hospital rejected this proposal,
claiming it would be more expensive.
Taglieri argues that
improvements to pensions and wages would ultimately benefit the hospital.
"We get that it's expensive to run a hospital. We're not blind to that,”
she underscored. “But we've been seeing more turnover. We need to provide
enough nurses for the patients we care for. If a mom comes in and delivers a
baby three months early in an emergency, we need to be prepared.”
Mann denied that Tufts has had
high turnover rates over the past two years, telling In These Times,
“Absolutely not. Our retention rate for nurses is 94 percent…one of the highest
in the country.”
Wages and pensions were not
the only points of contention. The union had pitched a proposal that the
hospital maintain a ratio of one nurse to one patient to comply with a 2014
Massachusetts law for
safe staffing of intensive care units, which limits scheduling ICU nurses
to one or two patients, depending on their severity.
Jennifer Johnson, spokesperson
for the MNA, told In These Times, "It became apparent it’s hard to achieve
because of expense. They withdrew that proposal, and the union made a major
concession with that. What we asked for instead was additional resources, and
improvements for charge nurses."
Anne Asci, 56, has been
employed at Tufts for 36 years as an intravenous transfusion (IV) nurse. She
works with oncology patients with hard-to-reach veins and outpatients who just
need someone to remove their IVs before going home.
She described her work to ITT
as sometimes putting in over 30 IV lines a day. “We staff two nurses for 10-hour
coverage from 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.”
Other nurses said that once
there were 10 to 12 IV nurses on a floor at Tufts, but now there are only a
handful, and none overnight. To relieve staffing issues, Tufts proposed
increasing charge nurse hours in medical and surgical units from 32 to 52 hours
a week.
Tufts’ argument is that money
is tight. According to an online post from chief nursing Officer Terry
Hudson-Jinks, the hospital is recovering from a $15 million loss in fiscal year
2015.
Yet, Taglieri insists the
hospital can do better. "We do have pretty good staffing within the NICU.
It's the adult side where we have concerns,” she said. “We don't have a lot of
room to absorb new admissions. For instance, we've had five or six admissions
in 12 hours, but if each nurse has patients, who will care for the emergency
patients in labor? Other hospitals have more of a cushion."
Some patients backed the
nurses’ collective action. In 2010, Shannon Kitterick Deibel’s son Brody was
transported to Tufts with a blockage in his intestines when he was only a few
months old. She and her husband were waiting to hear about a surgery when a
nurse stopped into their room. "That's when we met our nurse and hero, Ann
Marie. She made my husband I feel like it was going to be ok." Brody
underwent a nine-hour surgery days later to fix his intestines, and stayed in
the hospital for a month.
Describing her son's release
from surgery on a ventilator, Diebel said, "The nurse took my hand and
held it like it was her own child. Everyone in that unit was not there to just
make a paycheck, but to impact another life.”
When asked about her feelings
toward the nurses in light of the strike, Diebel replied: "I love
them."
The only way to defeat Trump—
and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves
from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.
Elements of the program for
this new Left are easy to imagine.
Trump promises the
cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the
left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international
agreements.
Such agreements would
establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights,
universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.
The big lesson of global
capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political
international has a chance of bridling global capital.
Excerpt from:
“We Must Rise from the Ashes
of Liberal Democracy”
BY Slavoj Žižek
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy
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