Saturday, July 11, 2020
“This is going to kill us—not coronavirus, but how broken the health care system is”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/ilnu-j10.html
An Illinois nurse speaks out against corporate control of health care systems
By Jessica Goldstein
10 July 2020
Lauren, a nurse from Illinois, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site after being furloughed for speaking out against a hospital’s corporate policies that discriminated against low-income patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her name has been changed and former hospital withheld to protect her from further retaliation.
“I worked in a case management position at a hospital in the central Illinois area,” she said. “I’ve worked in health care since I was 17 years old. In college I was working as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) and a waitress. Some days I went without sleep because I had to work non-stop.
“I was furloughed for speaking out about the visitor policy during the COVID-19 pandemic,” she explained. The state of Illinois had put a number of restrictions in place on the number of visitors and circumstances in which patients at hospitals could be allowed visitors. “The economic stress in central Illinois has gotten really bad, and a lot of the lower-income patients who were going through a difficult period in their treatment couldn’t have visitors when they needed them most.
“But if you knew the CEO—who makes a salary of over $1 million per year—you could have visitors. It’s called a VIP policy, and basically every hospital has one.
“I’m not alone in speaking out. There are nurses being furloughed all across central Illinois and the hospitals are firing the nurses who are speaking up.
“I’ve been writing to congresspeople in the state and speaking to them about it, but it’s not really going anywhere with them. I spoke to [Democratic] Senator Durbin about it, and he just said that he spoke with the CEO of the hospital, and that was all.
“There are some staff in the hospitals who are getting furloughed who make much less money than the nurses, and I feel for them. [Supplemental] unemployment is going to run out in a month, what are they going to do then? I remember the days living off of food stamps and hustling when I was growing up. It’s like treading water.
“The hospitals are making cuts because they’re not taking in revenue because other procedures have slowed down. At the last hospital I worked, they took away the nurses’ 401k, sick time, and made them take a 30 percent pay cut. How can these hospitals call us ‘heroes’ and then give us no benefits?
“It’s way worse in nursing homes. They are laying off nurses who got sick from COVID-19, and their revenue is down because people are afraid to be admitted to nursing homes because of the high death rate. All nursing homes are owned by big corporations, that is the problem.”
Both Democratic and Republican state officials, who are more concerned with serving the big business interests that they represent rather than the lives of millions of workers, criminally ignored warnings in December and January that the United States needed to prepare the medical system for the spread of the pandemic.
“When COVID-19 first hit the US in western states like Washington and California, the hospitals in Illinois were not ready by the time it took off in March. They knew cases were circulating in the US before, but hospital management did no preparatory work.
“We did get some new personal protective equipment [PPE] and supplies in advance, but not enough. We didn’t have enough N-95 respirators or PAPR [powered air purifying respirator] hoods. Nurses at the hospital where I worked were not fit-tested for N-95 masks, and even doctors were fit-tested too late.
“Floor nurses were told to wear procedural masks and only throw them away when they were visibly soiled, not between rooms, like we’re supposed to do normally. Another problem is that the Centers for Disease Control made a policy on re-using procedure masks without testing to see how effective those re-used masks were. When we learned that it was transmitted through the eyes as well we got goggles and eye protection that we had to re-use and share.
“Our ICU rooms were still just standard rooms, and not prepared for COVID-19 care. If we requested a test for a patient who we suspected to be sick with COVID-19, the hospital always came up with some reason to tell us ‘no.’ For example, they’d tell us the patient didn’t have enough symptoms, even if it was known that they’d traveled from a state with community spread like Washington.
“In the beginning, in March, no one could get tested. Then they started to test hospital staff. But the problem with testing even now is we don’t know how effective all the tests are because we don’t know at what point viral load is highest. You should get tested more than once because a test which comes back negative may not really be negative after a few days. But when I was working if you got a test and it came back negative, you weren’t tested again and quarantined, you came back to the hospital.
“When I looked at the pictures of hospitals treating COVID-19 in countries like China I could see how differently they were prepared. The staff wore full hazmat suits, and in the US I don’t know of any hospitals that have them.
“Some nurses and doctors in the US are wearing shower curtains, and there are companies I’ve heard of in the US that are making garments from shower curtain material-—but there hasn’t been enough testing done to really be sure that the kind of material is actually protective.”
Lauren contracted COVID-19 while working at the hospital, joining over 450,000 health care workers worldwide who have been infected with the disease.
“Over 30 nurses got COVID-19 at the hospital—out of the cases that were recorded. Long term, you’re not seeing the numbers of the support staff who get sick because they don’t usually tally them, but the support staff are just as exposed as we [frontline nurses and doctors]. Some of the staff who have the most exposure are the cleaning staff, they have no protection.
“COVID-19 has long-term effects. I still have trouble breathing when I’m walking upstairs. I have medical bills sitting on top of a bookshelf from when I was sick, that is where we are at as workers. I know where I got sick, at the hospital, but all of us need to know if the hospital is going to pay for these medical bills because it’s their responsibility.”
Lauren spoke out sharply against the astronomical growth of inequality since the pandemic began and the criminality of the corporate-controlled health care system.
“Insurance companies have been getting richer since this started. All the wealth now is filtering to the top, even in health care, and the differences are between who has money and who doesn’t. It’s for the dollar, not for patients. It’s not that so much money is spent on health care, it that it’s spent so inappropriately.
“The hospital management has always looked at cutting costs, and where they look to cut is patient care. We had never been fully staffed. At one hospital where I worked in cardiology I had 16 patients with one Licensed Practical Nurse. I was told not to fill out any reports to save time.”
Lauren described the physical and mental toll that corporate cost-cutting takes on health care workers. “Mentally you can feel like you’re failing every day. Some nurses cry every day—I don’t know one co-worker who wasn’t taking anti-depressant medications. There is a lot of staff turnover because the people who really care will burn out. I feel like going through COVID-19 we’re going to have PTSD.”
Similar to corporate policies in the auto industry and others, giant health care corporations have begun hiring temporary labor to replace full-time nurses for lower costs. “Newer people are coming in at the bottom, like traveling nurses, who come from temporary agencies. They pay a high hourly rate but they have no benefits. Because they are new at every hospital job, they might be good nurses but they’re not as well-trained in other aspects of the hospital they’re working at.”
She spoke in support of the strikes taking place around the world by health care workers demanding decent pay, benefits and an end to unsafe working conditions. “I think the strikes are great. I don’t know one nurse who doesn’t care about their patients. We want a safe number of patients and to make sure everyone has a mask who needs one. We just want to be treated like humans.”
Lauren pointed to the need for fundamental change in the way that health care is produced and distributed worldwide. “If we had socialized medicine this would not be happening. Somebody has to do something. This is going to kill us—not coronavirus, but how broken the health care system is. All of us need to get on the same page on how we handle health care and relationships around the world.”
Bath Iron Works expands strikebreaking operation as Maine shipyard walkout continues
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/bath-j10.html
By Shannon Jones
10 July 2020
The strike by 4,300 shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine is continuing into its third week with a federal mediator meeting with the union Monday in an effort to end the walkout at the facility, which builds ships for the US Navy. The strike began June 22 over contract issues, with workers voting by 87 percent to reject demands by General Dynamics, the shipyard operator, for a big expansion of outside contract labor.
This week, Bath Ironworks said it would lay off several dozen non-striking workers from International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local S7 who work as surveyors and trade inspectors. At the same time that management is laying off these workers, it has announced plans to step up its strikebreaking operation by hiring hundreds more outside contractors. Management has been attempting to maintain production during the strike, using about 2,500 contractors along with non-striking members of other unions.
About 220 machinists belonging to Local S7 at the shipyard have been crossing the picket lines of the far larger Local S6, whose members are on strike. The IAM has not raised any objections to other IAM members continuing to work inside the shipyard alongside strikebreakers in the midst of the bitter strike. In fact, this scandalous situation would not be possible without the blessing of the national IAM leadership.
A statement issued by Bath Iron Works President Dirk Lesko said the layoffs were temporary and were the result of the disruption caused by the strike.
By all accounts, workers are receiving warm and generous support from the community. However, like in so many past struggles, the role of the IAM has been to isolate and wear down the resistance of workers to concessions.
The main fear of the IAM and the AFL-CIO labor federation is not that workers will be defeated and forced to take concessions, but that the strike will encourage broader resistance in the working class. This is particularly the case as outrage grows over the reckless return-to-work and return-to-school policies as the pandemic continues to rage.
The shipyard is some six months behind in the delivery of destroyers to the US Navy, even as the US steps up its provocations against China and Russia. The shipyard is currently building six Arleigh Burke-class destroyers along with a Zumwalt-class destroyer with each ship having a price tag of well over $1 billion.
Under management’s new contract proposal, the company will be given expanded powers to hire subcontractors while seniority rights will be undermined, with management able to assign jobs regardless of length of service. Workers also report that the company wants to increase medical insurance deductibles, offsetting a paltry three percent annual wage increase.
An electrician at the Bath Iron Works wrote on Facebook “Even the supervisors have had enough! I’ve spoken with some. Its upper management that has been and unless you fix it, WILL be the problem! No one is happy with your experienced workers being out but the contract you put forward was bad. Take out subcontractors and seniority! That's the first step.”
The last contract in 2015 contained a wage freeze and other concessions that management claimed would help secure additional work for the shipyard. While the company has fattened its profits off the massive increase in military spending and the corporate tax handouts enacted by the Trump administration, predictably nothing is going back to the workers. Instead, General Dynamics has used $2.4 billion of its $15.3 billion in profits since 2018 to buy back its own stock in order to inflate share values.
A total of six Bath shipyard workers have tested positive for COVID-19, with three reported new cases diagnosed since the start of the strike. Management has maintained operations throughout the pandemic on the grounds that warships are “critical infrastructure.”
Showing its utter distain for its employees, the company cut workers off their company-paid health insurance on June 30.
The strategy of the IAM has been directed entirely at appealing for support from the political establishment on the grounds that General Dynamics is undermining national security by refusing to negotiate a contract.
Several local Maine politicians as well as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have issued perfunctory and platonic statements of support for striking workers, or more specifically for a return to negotiations.
IAM President Robert Martinez Jr. also sent a letter to the Trump administration asking for the help of the White House in resolving the strike. In the letter, the IAM said it would be willing “to work with all partners in the fight to save these vitally important jobs. We respectfully ask you to join us in this effort. We ask that you start by sending a strong reminder to the company of its commitment to these workers to the American public, to our men and women in uniform, who rely on world class ships built by world class workers...”
The assertion by the IAM that it will work with all “partners”—i.e. corporate management—to “save” jobs leaves little doubt that the union is prepared to hand over more concessions in exchange for maintaining its franchise and ability to extract dues from workers. For four decades, the fight to “save jobs” has been the mantra of the trade union bureaucracy as it has bargained away gains won by workers over the course of countless bitter struggles. In the process, the unions oversaw the destruction of millions of jobs while workers’ incomes declined or stagnated and social inequality increased to unheard-of levels.
According to the website Indeed.com, some jobs at the Bath Iron Works pay as little as $12 an hour. It is one of the largest employers in Maine and has been in operation since the late 19th century. It was acquired by General Dynamics in 1995. It has built well over 100 destroyers, frigates, cruisers and other Navy combat vessels.
The last strike at the Bath Iron Works was in 2000 and lasted 55 days. Workers rejected two contract proposals supported by the union before accepting a contract that still fell far short of their demands by 65 percent. The main issue was changes to contract language relating to job classifications as well as the demand for annual wage increases of eight percent followed by seven percent and seven percent. A strike in 1985 lasted 99 days.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party urge Bath shipyard workers to establish a rank-and-file strike committee to take the conduct of their struggle out of the hands of the IAM. There is an urgent need to expand the struggle and mobilize support from workers across the region nationally and internationally behind their fight. This includes, teachers, transport workers, health care workers, autoworkers and other ship builders. No help will be forthcoming from the representatives of the two big-business parties. Workers must rely on their own strength, but this requires a break with the corporate-controlled unions and their political alliance with the Democrats and Republicans.
At the same time, US workers must unite with workers around the world to oppose the drive to war and to transform the military industrial complex into socially useful industries, as part of the socialist reorganization of economic and political life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)