Support the Loretto Hospital strike!

It doesn’t have the grandeur of the Hollywood sign overlooking Los Angeles. But for hundreds of thousands of drivers heading west on Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway the large Loretto Hospital sign has been a familiar landmark for years. Today, that sign is accompanied by a militant picket line. The purpose of this article is to look at the Loretto Hospital workers strike.

Safety net in Austin

Loretto is a safety net hospital. This means that it will not turn away people unable to pay. It’s located in Austin, a generally poor Black neighborhood. It’s a smallish, not for profit hospital with 177 beds. However despite its size, it’s crucial to healthcare in Austin seeing large numbers of outpatients. It was front and center during the Covid pandemic.

It’s a tough place to work. The hospital has an extraordinary 60 percent annual staff turnover. Some departments have a vacancy rate of 25-35 percent. This obviously places great demands on the workers as the patient needs are still there, even if the necessary number of personnel aren’t. Overwork and stress are the order of the day. Wages lag behind other area hospitals, even though Loretto received $10 million from the State of Illinois to “address worker recruitment and retention.”

On strike

The strike began at 7:00 AM on July 31. There are 200 workers on strike. They are members of SEIU Healthcare Illinois. The job categories involved are patient transporters, patient care technicians, emergency room technicians, mental health and behavioral health workers, respiratory and radiology technicians, and housekeeping workers. The strikers are predominantly Black women. The nurses are organized in a separate AFSCME local and are not on strike.

Wages and adequate staffing are the central issues in the strike. These issues go hand in hand. Wages have to be high enough so that workers will want to stay at Loretto and not move to higher paying hospitals. With the recent state funding, management could certainly pay for the union demands. A union spokesperson said that the company had set aside $1.5 million for the expenses during the strike. This presumably means mainly for hiring scabs and some for “security”. This $1.5 million would more than fund the first year of the union’s contract proposal.

The picket is lively and spirited. Strikers wear the popular SEIU purple t-shirts and chants are kept up. The picket is well organized with a sound system, ample placards, a well-stocked refreshment tent, giant boxes of extra t-shirts, and bottled water constantly offered to picketers.

Both elected officials and solidarity activists from other unions are frequent visitors. There’s certainly an upbeat mood.

Routing vaccines to the rich and famous

Chicago readers might remember this isn’t the first time Loretto has been in the news recently. One of the more atrocious examples of Covid corruption occurred there. It’s worthy of a Netflix series! In March of 2021, Chicago city rules were that only frontline workers and those over 65 could get vaccinated. Vaccines were still scarce. Loretto vaccines were only to be used in the area. They were not available to anyone who wanted a shot.

This policy didn’t slow down Loretto CEO George Miller who used Loretto designated vaccines for mass injections at the Valley Kingdom Ministries Church in Oak Forest. Miller attended Valley Kingdom where he was a friend of the pastor.

Miller, however, was an angel compared to Chief Operating Officer Dr. Anosh Ahmed. On March 3, 2021 Anosh organized a vaccination event at Geneva Seal, a luxury watch and jewelry store. Geneva Seal is on Oak Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood, miles from Loretto. Apparently, the doctor was a regular there. An eyewitness reported that the nurses completing the paperwork and administering the shots were set up on the second floor in between the jewelry cases.

A week later, Ahmed organized a vaccination session at Trump Tower where he lived. One of those vaccinated was Eric Trump. Yes, that Eric Trump! This was despite the fact that the President’s son was not over 65, not a frontline worker, and not a Chicago resident.

Miller and Ahmed are now gone, but their actions show the type of issues Loretto workers have had to deal with. In some ways, Loretto is a tale of contemporary America. At the top, grotesque corruption. At the bottom, horrible working conditions for workers of color. Fortunately, there’s another part to the story here. The workers have an active union and are fighting back. They deserve our active support.