It's one reason why Republicans are pushing anti-union legislation
CATHY KENNEDY, RN for Common Dreams
 |
Citing concerns over lack of supplies and lack of staff, nurses at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in Los Angeles (LAMC) strike on June 23, 2022. (Photo: California Nurses Association) |
And, they are a key to winning improved living
standards for the entire working class and to the growth of unions. For nurses,
the strike has always been one of our most important tools for protecting
patients from the health and safety damage created by corporate cost-cutting.
Strikes in the U.S. rose by nearly 50% in
2022, according to Cornell University's School of
Industrial and Labor Relations. And the trend has continued this
year, including a three-day strike by
some 30,000 Los Angeles school teachers' aides, bus drivers, custodians, and
other support staff in March.
Wall Street tycoons and their allies in
elected office and the media have devoted decades to vilifying unions and the
very notion of workers going on strike to better the lives of workers and the
communities they live in. Yet 2022 also witnessed the largest rise in support
for unions in half a century, up to 71% public approval.
The message seems clear: Even when facing
virulent retaliation from employers, workers were willing to engage in dynamic
workplace actions, with growing support for unions.
Workers engaged in direct resistance to employers and the corporate class, and it does not appear they are turning back. For union nurses and other workers, understanding what we've been able to achieve, and how our approach has served our patients, will help us confront the challenges that lie ahead.
Nurses, teachers, journalists, and baristas
were among the thousands who walked picket lines, many winning substantial
gains and demanding an end to dangerous workplace conditions during the
pandemic and after years of corporate profiteering at the expense of working
people.
Militancy was also an emphatic response to
decades of far-right policies that created the largest wealth and income
disparity since the Great Depression, especially for workers of color. At the
bedside, nurses see every day how inequality and social injustice show up as
widening health disparities in our communities and increasingly ill patients in
our hospitals.
Union nurses have aligned ourselves with a
long legacy of union militancy, in part to get to the root of these structural
problems. Yet, there remain compromises in the labor movement that pose
challenges to workers' collective power.
Worker upsurge in the 1930s–and a
willingness to utilize a variety of innovative strategies from hunger marches
to sit down strikes to general strikes–led to decades of rising union
membership and improved standards.
Of course, many of these gains
disproportionately benefited white workers, but the best of these militant
upsurges demanded a better life, and more power, for the entire working class.
A Labor Retreat: Labor-Management
Partnerships
Corporations and the right mounted a
counterrevolution against unions and the broader struggles they were connected
to. Nurses and the working people we've cared for endured the worst of a
neoliberal agenda of tax breaks for corporations and the rich, austerity, and
repressive anti-union policies aimed at rolling back union gains and
eliminating labor rights and workplace protections.
Sadly, a number of unions concluded they
had lost the ability to fight employers and that to survive they had to join
them in "labor-management partnerships."
The partnerships accommodated corporate
business plans, and, as a priority, curbed labor militancy, above all by
restricting the strike weapon. As more unions pursued collaboration with
employers, workplace actions plummeted. The 1990s saw an average of just 35
major strikes per year, a number that fell to just 13 in 2003.
In the increasingly influential health-care
industry, a key turning point came in the 1990s. Kaiser Permanente, one of the
nation's leading health-care systems, and my employer, won backing from doctors
and some other medical professionals to provide bonuses for pushing patients
out of hospitals earlier as well as additional patient-care cuts.
My union, the California Nurses Association
(CNA), was a major impediment. CNA and Kaiser RNs, like myself, fought against
anti-worker and anti-patient concessions, preparing a strategy of action
against Kaiser's injurious practices.
But on the first day of a strike in April
1997, Kaiser pulled out a major weapon–signing a sweeping Labor Management
Partnership (LMP) with its biggest unions to divide the workers and disrupt
Kaiser union solidarity.
The LMP promised to limit its union
partners from some of Kaiser's most severe cost cutting. But it exempted
restructuring plans already developed–including hospital closures, cuts in patient
services it deemed not profitable enough, and reductions in employee pay and
benefits–and even allowed Kaiser to move forward on future harmful plans to
patients and workers.
Further, the LMP prohibited participants
from public criticism of its damaging practices, required support for its
legislative goals such as opposition to workplace and patient safety, and
turned the unions into sales agents for the company.
Our union refused to join the Kaiser LMP
because we knew then, as we know now, which side we were on. Our partnership is
always with our patients, our communities, and the working class, not our
employers.
Instead, we mobilized the energy of our
then 7,500 RNs in 47 Kaiser facilities for over a year and half. It wasn't
easy, but we generated widespread public support and, in the end, CNA nurses
forced Kaiser to withdraw its concession demands. And we won significant gains,
including a stronger voice for nurses in patient-care decisions.
Within the next few years, through our
public and patient advocacy, we also forced Kaiser to rescind its plan to close
three hospitals in diverse, working-class communities, continued to expose and
block some other patient-care cuts, and continued to win gains for our members
and patients. All without signing onto the LMP.
LMPs entice workers to identify with
"their" corporations at the expense of their unity with other
workers, strengthening corporations, prioritizing profits and inherently
undermining the antagonism against the exploitation that unions were developed
to challenge. This partnership approach has not created more union jobs in this
country, and, for nurses, it has proved detrimental to worker safety and
patient care.
For us, this means advancing social justice
unionism premised on benefiting the entire working class and fighting for
worker rights, economic justice, racial/gender/LGBTQ+ justice, climate justice,
Medicare for All, and a strong commitment to strengthened democracy in the
workplace and beyond.
This stance is not only a matter of
principle but increases our ability to fight and win—to build strong support
from other workers, patients, and the public at the bargaining table and on the
strike line.
Gains for Our Patients Without a Labor
Management Partnership
CNA's militant approach to unionism, and
the gains it has delivered over the years, has been key to our growth. We've
shown that when we fight, we win—and when we win, more nurses want to join us
in the fight. National Nurses United, which CNA helped found with other
progressive nurses' unions, now represents 225,000 RNs and other direct care
health-care workers from coast to coast.
In 2022, our union conducted more than two
dozen strikes and hundreds of other workplace protests, pickets, candlelight
vigils, press conferences, marches on the boss, and shift change actions from
California to Florida to Maine.
Through these fights, we were not only able
to win historic wage increases, but also compelled our employers to increase
infectious disease control prevention measures for patient and worker safety in
the face of the pandemic, adopt robust workplace violence prevention plans, and
pledge to hire thousands of additional RNs to improve safe staffing.
Nationally, labor is at a critical
crossroads.
For the first time, we've won contracts
that include creation of a new regional Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
committee to address systemic racism with a commitment to securing a
discrimination-free workplace and ending racial and ethnic disparities in
health-care outcomes. And we put Kaiser, one of the nation's largest health
insurers, on record that health care is a human right.
Nationally, labor is at a critical
crossroads. We continue to face the extreme danger of reaction and attacks on
our rights, our democracy, and our diverse communities that put our future as a
people in jeopardy.
But we also have the opportunity to expand
on the achievements for unions and workers in their fights for a healthy
society, especially by vigorously challenging those who profit off labor and
division among workers and prioritizing the united, class-based, social justice
approach on behalf of union members and the working class as a whole.
CATHY KENNEDY, RN
is a registered nurse and President of
the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
