All Out for NYC Nurses for Single Payer & A General Strike - No Medicare Advantage

ALL OUT FOR THE NYC NURSES
FOR SINGLE PAYER AND FOR A GENERAL STRIKE

The New York City League of Voluntary Hospitals has forced 15,000 workers to go out on strike in the dead of winter. At the heart of the matter is the call for safe staffing. The chant by the nurses is safe staffing saves lives. So why has such a fundamental call gone unheeded? After a week and a ½ Montefiore and the other two hospitals , Columbia Presbyterian and Mt Sinai have finally agreed to go back to the table but instead of understanding and appreciating how hard the nurses work and how much they want to protect their patients, these presidents, who make millions themselves and pay out big dividends to their shareholders, use the desire of the nurses to care for their patients against them. Between the three presidents, they have spent 100 million dollars on scab nurses rather than paying the NYSNA nurses what they deserve. The irony is that the travelling nurses are starting to leave because they are understanding how hard the job really is. The nurses are incredibly caring and concerned about their patients, so why isn’t the administration concerned about the patients? The healthcare system in the US is a strictly for profit concern and so making millions takes precedence over the lives of the healthcare workers and the patients they serve. One person, a four-year-old child has already died at Mt Sinai hospital in Manhattan and it has become clear that at least at Monetefiore hospital, the scabs have no idea what they are doing since they have not been trained, that there are now arguments between them and the 1199 workers who continue to work in the hospital. They must all go out together! .

Three hospitals have gone out, out of 8 and this is because the League has used the divide and conquer tactic, that is giving decent health care to some of the nurses, while denying it to nurses at Montefiore, Mt Sinai and Colombia Presbyterian. So, at the heart of the call for safe staffing is the urgent need for single payer. Millions of American workers are either going without healthcare or are being forced to live with inferior healthcare, having to decide between eating or paying the rent or going to the doctor. This strike is literally a matter of life and death.

Why, with such a powerful union as NYSNA, is this situation even occurring. Unlike in other industrialized countries, the American healthcare system is a for profit system. Capitalism reigns supreme so it is then possible to understand the motives of the CEO and the insurance companies which hope to keep the costs down. But what of the trade union leaders? What could the leadership have done about the scabs? In unity there is strength. One of the things that NYSNA could have done in the last contract was to have it end in April when the 1199 contract ends as opposed to in January where the nurses were essentially forced to strike alone. That could have meant a complete shut down of the hospital, undermining the bosses and Hochul’s strikebreaking scheme. The other thing that NYSNA could have done is fight for single payer, that is with single payer a fact, there would be no need to negotiate healthcare for the nurses because that would not be on the table now. It is so ironic that those who are most connected to healthcare, cannot receive decent healthcare themselves. This must be a fight that NYSNA and all the other unions must wage and cannot afford to lose. The Trump administration is planning to throw millions of people off the Medicaid rolls so that there will be untold numbers of people who will fall sick and die as a consequence of this plan. Hospitals around the country will close and many of the most vulnerable will live very precarious lives. In order to focus on single payer, this would require a fight that would involve the entirety of the NYC working class to win. If this fight literally means the life and death of the patients, then the bureaucrats of the Central Labor Council should bring workers from the myriad trade unions in NYC to the picket line. Since they didn’t, we must analyze what has gone wrong. The reason is simple; many of the bureaucrats profit off the private insurance scheme, so to mount a fight it would be necessary to call for a general strike which would mean a loss of control of their own members.

In the meantime, while patients are forced to sleep in the hallways, the Presidents have given themselves a 50 percent increase in their pay packets and yet , rather than pulling out members from the myriad unions to swell the nurses picket lines, the CLC talks about supporting the nurses, but has not delivered on its promise.

While workers are suffering because of this crisis, much of the union leadership has profited immensely and continues to make deals with management that will result in the death of many of its members. The latest debacle is the deal that the MLC has made with United Healthcare that will force millions of city workers to take a 5-year contract, with 4 of the years redacted so that no one knows exactly what they are getting. But even now, the corporate union leadership in conjunction with the politicians are doing the bidding of the industry by trying to push working class people off Medicare which was wrested from the government in 1965 with the hope of putting seniors into a managed care privatized program called Medicare Advantage. “Leaders” such as the UFT president Michael Mulgrew and Henry Garrido of DC 37 opposed Medicare for All and participated in delaying a bill in NYC which would have guaranteed single payer, that is free healthcare for all its residents. The current President of Teamsters Local 237, the largest local in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Gregory Floyd. and who is also the Vice President at-Large of the IBT and Vice President of the AFL-CIO sits on the Emblem Health insurance company Board of Directors. It is not surprising that these sell outs are unwilling to fight for their members.

Moreover, ICE has been a constant, trying to snatch undocumented and documented workers from their hospital beds. The nurses must deal with this racist calamity as well and yet on the picket line, these calamities were mentioned but no solution was offered. Moreover, racism plays a definite role in the lack of investment in the Bronx since the majority of the population are people of color. Investment is going to places such as Westchester and White Plains, which are much whiter and wealthier areas.

The answer the bureaucrats always give to this dilemma is the same: i.e. the Democratic Party. But Hochul, our governor, has come out on the side of the hospitals against the nurses. Hochul: “To address potential staffing issues, issued a state of emergency executive order. This order allowed healthcare professionals from other states or Canada to practice in New York, permitted certain nursing graduates to practice under supervision for a limited time, and activated a system to manage patient transfers and overcrowding.” This is not surprising coming from a DP hack, and yet the unions continue to lobby these people as if they are neutral and could be persuaded to support the workers’ just cause.

The times that we are living in are so dire given the fascist nature of the federal government, there cannot be a business as usual approach to these grave problems. The leadership will not be able to make deals that come even close to what is required to live in NYC. Like in Minneapolis, the NYC working class must organize a general strike and cut our ties with the politicians who can’t deliver on their promises since their job is to guarantee the quiescence of the working class. This is war and therefore we need to organize our siblings and fight for a general strike and end our dependence on the politicians, and we need to organize a labor party that will fight for our interests. The billionaires’ wealth has to be expropriated by a labor party and the wealth that working people created needs to go to healthcare, education, housing and public services. Working people and our unions need to demand that the trillions that are going to war and genocide be redirected to what working people need. That means, we will have to get rid of business unionist officials who are narrow in their thinking and elect people who will fight against the capitalists and for the interest of working people.

The nurses who are engaging in this fight for decent healthcare are heroes who have taken on the challenge to fight for the rights and the dignity of their patients. We must support them and organize support from every union in New York.

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