Ira Grupper irag@iglou.com

LABOR PAEANS— February 2011

Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )

Note: I am privileged to turn over this entire column over to Francis Sandy Eaton. Sandy is a registered nurse from Massachusetts, active in healthcare reform and progressive politics for many years, currently serving as chair of the Legislative Council of the National Nurses United. Please send any comments on this column to me, and I will forward to Sandy.

Labor & Healthcare Justice

By Francis Sandy Eaton

The working class is under attack on all fronts, including health care. While decent, affordable housing is snatched away through foreclosures and the removal of HUD subsidies from thirty-year-old projects, while quality, affordable education is undermined through standardized testing, attacks on teachers and their unions, and slashing of budgets as tax cuts are pushed by most politicians, while employment prospects dim in this jobless recovery as the richest grow yet fatter at the expense of the rest of us, we still see healthcare justice as remote and fading, without organized resistance and countermeasures.

But there is organized resistance and a growing movement to drive the money-changers out of the temple of health care. First, what do I mean by healthcare justice? I see four factors that must be addressed at the same time: access, affordability, quality and equality.

Access: Can you get the health services you need in the most appropriate setting? Even when current legislation is fully enacted, over the next decade, we will still have tens of millions of people in the US without coverage.

Affordability: Can you access needed health services without going bankrupt or depriving yourself or your family of other life necessities, like food and rent? Medical debt remains the single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy, and healthcare costs are driving more municipalities toward insolvency.

Quality: What are your chances of surviving an encounter with our current healthcare system? While an estimated forty thousand people in this country die each year from lack of health insurance, ninety-eight thousand die each year unnecessarily in our hospitals from preventable infections, injuries and other complications.

Equality: Do you, your family or your community experience special barriers to needed care? Mass-Care, the Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Health Care, recently sponsored a study comparing current health outcomes in Boston’s poor and predominantly African-American community of Roxbury with those in the 1970s, without finding significant improvement despite official commissions and scads of discussion of diversity and disparities.

Over the last several years, we have seen considerable discussion and political action, at the state and national levels, regarding changes to our grossly unjust and inefficient healthcare system. While the profiteers with their priorities emerged unbowed and emboldened, a kernel of hope has been planted which promises to grow into a formidable force for fundamental change.

Resolution 34 of the September 2009 AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh proclaimed a goal of a national social health insurance program, single payer. This resolution was the result of seventy pro-single-payer resolutions submitted in the pre-convention period, more resolutions on one issue than ever before in the history of the AFL-CIO. The steady growth of Labor’s commitment to fundamental healthcare change grew from the work of the All-Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care-HR.676, organized by Kay Tillow from Louisville, Kentucky.

By the time the national debate over health care took off early in 2009, nearly six hundred labor organizations in forty-nine states had already endorsed the Medicare for All bill, HR 676, which had been submitted to Congress by Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, among others. Thirty-nine state labor federations, one hundred thirty-five central labor councils and twenty-two national and international unions stood up to be counted.

To deepen and mobilize this sentiment, the Labor Campaign for Single Payer was organized in Saint Louis in January of that year. This coalition set as its first goal the adoption of Medicare for All as a strategic goal of organized labor.

Following the 2010 enactment of the limited federal reform, and in the wake of the 2010 elections, the pendulum has swung to the states. Among the contradictory results of the November elections, three states elected governors advocating or open to state-based single-payer efforts: Vermont, California and Hawai’i. Unions in Vermont and the Vermont Workers Center, an affiliate of Jobs with Justice, provide the solid backbone of the movement for health care as a human right in the Green Mountain State.

Unions representing those who work in health care tend to be particularly involved in the refashioning of their industry. In December 2009, after several prior attempts, a new national nurses’ union took shape as National Nurses United. It was created through the coming together of the California Nurses Association and its National Nurses Organizing Committee (which includes nurses associations in Maine and Pennsylvania), the Massachusetts Nurses Association, and the United American Nurses, once the collective bargaining sector of the American Nurses Association, which includes nurses associations in Minnesota, Michigan, DC and Kentucky, as well as RNs in twenty-two VA hospitals.

The NNU at the outset represented over 150,000 nurses and one of its founding principles is the creation of a national, single-payer system of health care. Other independent nurses’ unions have since affiliated. New organizing efforts in Missouri, Texas and Florida have led to NNU’s current size of 160,000 members.

On the healthcare quality front, the California Nurses Association led the fight against the hospital industry and Governor Schwarzenegger in enacting and defending the nation’s first enforceable limit to the number of patients a nurse may be required to care for at one time, thereby greatly reducing the risk of injury and death in the hospital setting. This necessary patient protection has become the overarching goal of nurses across the country, working at the state and federal level, and through collective bargaining.

In the spring of 2010, nurses in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota engaged in the largest nurses’ strike in the history of the country in an attempt to establish enforceable safe staffing standards. One thousand nurses and five hundred allied professionals successfully struck Temple University Medical Center in Philadelphia for twenty-eight days to block the administration’s attempt to impose a gag rule, which would have prevented them from advocating for their patients in the healthcare assembly line. More recently, nurses in Bangor, Maine, undertook a one-day strike, preceded by a two-day lockout, pressing their case for a reasonable, safe limit to their patient assignments.

Nationally, from for-profit hospital corporations to insurance and pharmaceutical outfits, the fight over healthcare intensifies. All the furor we’ve witnessed in recent years over healthcare reform is but a prelude to the battles ahead, since the basic injustice of a healthcare system driven by the marketplace and corporate greed tramples the human need for this vital social service.

Contact Francis Sandy Eaton: sandyern@comcast.net