The nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, have been on strike for eight months. On March 8, they walked out after they were unable to reach a deal with the hospital’s for-profit parent company, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, that would provide for staffing levels that nurses like Dominique Muldoon considered safe for patient care.
The year 2021 has been one of worker anger boiling over.
By August, the nurses and the hospital had reached a hard-won compromise. Muldoon, a member of the negotiating committee, says the deal would provide more support for nurses, bringing on resource nurses and assigning fewer patients to nurses who were looking after the sickest patients. “It would increase safety so much more,” Muldoon told me in October at the nurses’ strike headquarters across from the hospital.
The nurses thought they had an agreement that would let them return to work. Then the hospital informed them that it intended to keep some of the replacement nurses in their positions—meaning that longtime nurses who’d been on strike would lose their jobs. “They’re trying to send a message to other unionized nurses and probably nonunionized nurses in their other hospitals,” says Marie Ritacco, another Saint Vincent nurse and vice president at the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA).
Thousands of workers, in health care and outside of it, have gone on strike or voted to do so this year, as the pandemic wears on and bosses attempt to return to “normal.” Those workers have been on the front lines for almost two years and have realized, to put it bluntly, that management doesn’t care if they die. The Saint Vincent nurses remind us that everyone has a breaking point and that so many of us have reached it in this time of cascading crises—and the length of their struggle reminds us just how hard it is to win under a political economic system designed to wring every last dollar from workers’ sweat, blood, and tears.
“It is a transformative time, and we feel it more so now than on March 8,” Ritacco says. “The pandemic has changed everything, and it’s an opportunity. I feel like we are right at the forefront. So, although it’s been really difficult, I consider us fortunate to help lead the way because I think we can make a difference.”
The year 2021 has been one of worker anger boiling over. When those workers, like most Americans, are unorganized and unionless, the result has been what commentators are now calling the “Great Resignation,” with a record 4.3 million quitting their jobs in the month of August alone. And when workers do have a union, they’ve been expressing that anger through the strike. “It’s like we’ve been asleep and we’re waking up,” Muldoon explains.
By late October, more than 400 workers at Heaven Hill Distillery in Kentucky, about 600 Frito-Lay workers, and more than 1,000 Nabisco workers had concluded strikes. Some 1,400 of their comrades in the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union at Kellogg’s were still out on the picket lines.
There were also strikes by nurses and hospital workers at Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York, the McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Oregon, Sutter Delta Medical Center in California, and Logan Health in Montana. Some 10,000 United Auto Workers members at John Deere were on strike, while UAW members were voting to change the way union officials are elected.
Meanwhile, 60,000 members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees are considering a tentative agreement to avoid a landmark strike in the film and television industry, and up to 52,000 health care workers across Kaiser Permanente facilities in several states have authorized a strike if a deal isn’t reached. Almost 300 flight attendants at Piedmont Airlines, an American Airlines subsidiary, and around 2,000 Harvard graduate student workers have authorized strikes as well. The fervor isn’t just in the United States. To give just one overseas example, rail and sanitation workers in Glasgow, Scotland, voted to strike during the COP26 climate summit if their demands were not met. And these are just the ones off the top of my head.
Some on social media dubbed the month of October “Striketober,” and commentators like Robert Reich wrote breathless takes comparing what’s happening to a “general strike.” But this obscures the reality—and the challenges—that striking workers still face.
Workers from Frito-Lay to film sets have complained of long hours, forced overtime, low pay, and lousy health insurance, all while their companies rake in profits. Film crews, returning to “normal” after months of reduced work and added safety precautions, realized how impossible their schedules were, while food production workers stayed on the job and watched their colleagues fall ill or quit without work speeds slowing.
In several of these strikes, workers voted down tentative agreements reached by union leadership pre-strike or during the strike; in others, though agreements were ratified, “no” votes were high and online worker forums saw many angry posts from workers unhappy with the deals. While analyzing each agreement and vote count is beyond the scope of this column, such discontent might indicate that union leadership has underestimated the level of anger that the rank-and-file members are feeling when they look at sky-high profits and their own working conditions.
But the reality is that manufacturing workers still, despite supply chain issues, face the threat of outsourcing. It’s difficult to force companies to keep factories open by refusing to work, as the workers at General Motors learned when they struck in 2019. Despite a unified and angry workforce that did win some of its demands, the iconic Lordstown GM plant in Ohio remained closed.
The nurses, notes David Schildmeier of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, have leverage that manufacturing workers don’t. “They can’t take our hospitals overseas.” That’s why, he says, the nurses make an effort to show up for other workers who walk out. “We realize as an organization we owe a duty to those workplaces that don’t have our advantage, that don’t have the public cachet that others do.”
Nurses and other workers around the country—and even across the ocean—have reached out to the Massachusetts Nurses Association to talk about organizing and, if necessary, striking. So many of them, Muldoon says, have realized that even before COVID-19, workers were being squeezed and equipment pared back to the basics.
“Everything was bare-bones staffing, bare-bones equipment. There was never enough of the equipment we needed to do our jobs,” she says. Everything was running on “just-in-time” supply even before the supply chain crisis, Ritacco notes. “We run out of IV tubing, we run out of IV fluid, we run out of towels, bedpans, urinals—the basic equipment to take care of patients. Our employer, I believe, looked at what we did during the pandemic and said, ‘Wow, they can do more.’ ”
Yet even with public support and the inability to outsource their work, the nurses say bosses don’t seem to care how bad conditions get and seem more determined to break the union than make a deal. That’s why the union is holding firm until all the nurses get their jobs back—particularly because many of the nurses being replaced are leaders in the union, the same experienced workers who provide expert care and help newer nurses learn the job. “Who in a nursing shortage in a pandemic incentivizes nurses to leave the bedside? It’s despicable,” Muldoon says.
The nurses understand the reasons for the “Great Resignation,” too. “We’ve lost a lot of really good nurses,” Ritacco says, from older nurses who might have stayed on a few more years before retirement, to young nurses new to the job. “If this were my first year out of school, the year of the pandemic, I would have found something else to do. Over the years, you develop a love for the profession and now you can’t separate me from [it]. But you certainly could have in year one or year two.” A survey conducted by MNA found that 37 percent of respondents planned to leave nursing sooner because of COVID-19.
And while excitement around “Striketober” floats around social media, the reality of maintaining the strike is grueling. Early on, Schildmeier says, people constantly asked what they could do, and showed up to support the strikers. But lately, people have moved on to fresher strikes. The nurses, though, have to cobble together per-diem work when they can get it, and battle the company and the state over unemployment benefits.
But the nurses sustain one another on and off the picket line. The strike, they say, has given them time and space to process the horrors of the pandemic, to take care of one another. “This has made us stronger as a body of unionized nurses,” Ritacco says. “We have friends who are family. We felt that way before, but now, the bond cannot ever be broken.”
And to the other workers on strike or considering it in the coming weeks and months, she says, “You’re on the right track. We know that if we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one will. It is way too important to the labor movement, way too important to our patients to give in to this corporate beast.”
“Our best weapon is just staying out on the street,” she concludes, “to last one day longer than they can.”