Labor Notes: April month of trouble making (part II)

Click here to read the first part of the series.

Healthcare— fighting on the frontlines

The April 18 Labor Notes session was perhaps the most powerful yet. The theme was healthcare workers’ struggles and all of the speakers had considerable experience under their belts. The background to their struggles was described in an earlier article on this website.(https://internationalsocialism.net/healthcare-workers-fight-both-the-virus-and-the-employers/). The first speaker was a Chicago public school nurse. He explained that the current struggles by CTU school nurses was the result of years of patient preparatory work. Today’s dramatic struggles would not have been possible without quiet and systematic organizing beforehand. For sometime now, the CTU has made the fight for a school nurse in every building a central union demand. Nurses were obviously at center stage in the recent CTU battles against premature and unsafe school reopening.

The CTU has not only fought for its own members, it has made student and community healthcare a priority. This has been expressed in the slogan, “Students’ learning conditions are our working conditions.” The union describes this approach as, “bargaining for the common good.” This outlook has been concretized in provisions, in the recent Memorandum of Understanding on high school reopening, for students and parent vaccinations.

The second speaker described the impressive history of union activity at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, California. The centerpiece of the evening were the presentations by two strikers from St Vincent hospital in Worchester, Massachusetts. St Vincent is owned by healthcare giant Tenet which received $3 billion from the CARES act and recently reported profits of $414 million. About 650 nurses have been on strike since March 8. Most strikes in the healthcare industry are what are called demonstration orclosed strikes. This means that the duration of the strike, normally several days, is announced beforehand with a definite ending date. Often there will then be a lock out as the hospital finishes out its contract with scab nurses. The St. Vincent strike is open ended, meaning that it will continue until the union decides to return to work. This is a real upping-the ante and the union deserves our respect for its courage.

Patient-to-nurse ratios are one of the main issues in the strike. Just like the Chicago school nurses, these workers are fighting for those they care for. The St Vincent nurses have a tough road ahead. A good number of nurses have crossed the line. 200 out of state scabs are in the hospital. The union is hoping that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will soon allow them to receive unemployment benefits. Some relief has come from an unexpected source. Buried deep in the small print of the Biden stimulus package is a provision that strikers may continue to receive insurance under COBRA. This new policy removes one of management’s weapons that is commonly used against strikers—rescinding health insurance.

Healthcare workers are not just on the frontlines of the fight against Covid, they are also on the frontlines of the class struggle.

Past practice grievances

Bob Schwartz’s workshops are always one of the highpoints of a Labor Notes conference. Bob is a highly experienced pro-union attorney who can explain the details of labor law clearly and straightforwardly. This workshop discussed “prior practices and procedures.” This occurs when a workplace policy has been in place for a considerable period of time, but has not been memorialized in the contract. The policy can take on the status of contract language and thus its violation can be grieved. For example, a school district, for years, has allowed teachers to leave the building fifteen minutes after the students have left. But, there’s nothing in the contract about this. It’s just the way things are done. If management wants to extend the length of the teacher work day in such a situation, it would be violating “prior practices and procedures.” These violations can often be the basis for effective union action.

Austerity in education— seeing it in class terms

“Austerity: the Myth and How to Fight It” was the topic of the April 22 session. There were two speakers Anneta Argyres, a National Education Association (NEA) activist from Massachusetts, and Geva Hickman-Johnson from the NEA in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The majority of participants were in education and most seemed to be in higher education. In this situation, it was natural that the discussion focused on austerity in education. Anneta argued that austerity was driven by conscious political choices and not a sheer lack of economic resources. The central reason for austerity was not shortage of funds in general, but shortage of funds due to tax breaks for the wealthy. She used the example of how Scott Walker lowered taxes on the rich prior to his attacks on the Wisconsin public sector as an example of this trend. Public services were being gutted so that money would go into the pockets of the rich.

Geva explained the fight for adequate school funding by the union in Prince George’s County. She gave a very interesting account of their fight with Governor Hogan. However, most Labor Notes supporters would probably see things from a different angle. Geva argued that, “We know there need to be budgets cuts.”Her point was that education should not be cut.

We should oppose all cuts in public spending, not just those in education. We don’t say that we have priority over health care, child services, or other social programs. The workers and users in these programs are our allies in the fight for greater social services.

If we reject any cuts in public services, where will the necessary money come from? There’s only one place and that’s from taxing the rich. There’s a probably apocryphal story that when asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton replied, “because that’s where the money is”! The money for adequate public services is in the pockets of the rich.

This same issue came up again in another discussion at the meeting. There’s obviously a great deal of managerial waste and inefficiency. Any public sector unionist can give a hundred examples of it. However, as Anneta correctly pointed out campaigning for cuts in administrative bloat is inadequate and taxing the rich is necessary.

The famous British communist dock workers leader Jack Dash has a request for the epitaph on his gravestone. He wanted the mason to engrave, “Here lies Jack Dash / All he wanted was / To separate them from their cash.” Jack was on the right track.

Secrets of a Successful Organizer: The work and methods of the labor movement

The British revolutionary group Anti*Capitalist Resistance recently held an online meeting to launch their new book System Crash. One of the speakers, Simon Hannah, made an important point. Simon was describing how today huge mass demonstrations, such as the BLM, are organized rapidly and successfully on social media. However, in contrast to past social movements, these movements can ebb rapidly and no durable organization is left in place to continue the struggle. Simon commented that one of the reasons for this was the absence among young activists of some of the ways in which the labor movement has traditionally organized.

If one wanted a perfect example of what I think Simon was getting at, it would have been the April 21 session, “Turning an Issue into a Campaign.” It was the third and final meeting in the Secrets of a Successful Organizer track. This time Joe DeManuelle Hall was joined by Luis Feliz Leon as organizers of the meeting. The basic theme of the meeting was: what are the tasks that need to be implemented in order to move from a sense of unhappiness at a management action to an organized campaign that forces management to back down on that issue? Our task is not only forcing the bosses to retreat, but to do it in a way that also builds up the unity and organization of the union. We also have to remember that one can only go so far in embarrassing or shaming the employer. If the struggle is a hard one, we will almost certainly have to find the appropriate way of disrupting normal operations and procedures in the workplace.

This approach means giving careful answers to a series of questions such as:

What precisely are we demanding?
Who exactly are we targeting to implement our demand?
What tactics do we see as likely to win this particular demand?
Who will organize our actions?
What group will our activists report back to?
Out of our whole inventory of tactics (all the way from letters of protests to strikes), which will be the most effective at the moment?
What type of actions will the workers support today at the very beginning of the campaign?
We will obviously counter management intransigence with escalating responses by the union. How do we decide which tactics fit the level of escalation that we are seeking to achieve?
How do we explain the steps from one stage of our campaign to the next?
How do we gauge the success or failure of our actions?
What is our timeline for this campaign?

This systematic approach is exactly the one used by our forebears to build the industrial unions in the 1930’s. It’s good to see that it is alive and well at Labor Notes.

Part three of this series will take the final four sessions of the Labor Notes conference.