Lessons from historic nurses strike in a time of growing fascism

WORCESTER, January 18—On March 8, 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 800 nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts took to the streets demanding safe patient to staff ratios and safe working conditions, a capitalist nightmare for their bosses at Tenet Healthcare (the parent company for St. Vincent’s). Nurses were forced to resort to wearing garbage bags for personal protective equipment and hundreds became infected with Covid-19 (portside.org). The pandemic was exposing our broken, racist, medical system, and the nurses were refusing to accept it. Just as with the recent nurses strike in NYC (see page 3), they were strong and united and won broad multiracial community support because their demands proved their antiracist, pro-working-class commitment to patients.

Progressive Labor Party members walked the picket line regularly and our communist ideas were welcomed by many (CHALLENGE, 10/9/2021). Many politicians and religious groups also supported the strike.  However, their role was to curb militancy on the picket line by pushing pacifism, and voting. Tenet retaliated by flying in replacement nurses, “scabs” from California to break the strike and bust the union. Tenet also paid the police $30,000 a day to escort the scabs across the picket line.

Nurses fight healthcare bosses’ attacks
After a valiant 10 month strike, nurses won their safe staffing demand, but the Tenet bosses continued to wage class war. After the contract was voted in, they forced all the nurses to reapply for their jobs. The intimidation and humiliation surrounding this process forced more nurses out.

Then, Tenet used the Right to Work Foundation to decertify the nurses’ union. The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) won the decertification vote by only a small margin. Conditions are no worse than before the strike and forced overtime is still an issue. Each additional patient assigned to a nurse increases the odds by seven percent that one of their patients will die (nationalnursesunited.org). The nurses continue to fight back against the hemorrhaging of nurses and other workers. More recently Tenet announced a plan to close the hospital’s IV unit and force the nurses and doctors to do this job. The nurses picketed outside Tenet boss Carolyn Jackson’s office to protest this disastrous move and presented a petition demanding that the IV Unit be maintained.

As the third largest for-profit healthcare corporation in the U.S., Tenet had staying power in the strike. Their 465 day surgery centers, 110 other outpatient centers, and 60 other hospitals, guaranteed that the profits kept rolling in. Run by unscrupulous CEO’s committed to their profit margins, Tenet created an unsafe environment for patients and staff, closing beds and services to prolong the strike.  These thieves have been convicted and fined many times for unfair firings, overcharging Medicare, doing unnecessary procedures, hospitalizing psychiatric patients unnecessarily, and many other crimes against patients and staff (justice.gov). During Covid-19, Tenet’s union-busting greed knew no bounds. They got $600 million in federal grants and used it to acquire 45 hospital ambulatory centers, while they furloughed and laid off workers (Forbes).

Striking against the bosses flexes the working class’s potential power. Using that momentum to build a communist movement will ultimately institute workers’ power.

Union sells workers down the river
The MNA rallied the courage and commitment of the hospital’s nurses and conducted a serious strike, but they were hampered by the pro-capitalist outlook of the trade union movement. This outlook kept them focused on their own immediate demands rather than on spreading the strike and building the political consciousness that steels workers for the harsh battles ahead.

The MNA leadership squandered the opportunity to organize the entire nation-wide membership of National Nurses United (NNU) to strike in solidarity with St. Vincent’s nurses as well as organize health care workers in all of Tenet’s facilities across the country. This effort could have electrified healthcare workers nationally.

Similarly, in 2018, the national teachers’ unions could have called a national strike in solidarity with the teachers strikes for full funding in more than a half dozen states.
It’s this kind of strategic outlook that workers in every industry need to gain the upper hand in the class struggle.

Workers’ health sacrificed for profit
The evolution of the U.S. economy is paving the way to fascism. Since the 1980s, when the manufacturing sector moved to cheaper production overseas, capitalists have scrambled to find profitable capital investments, the most reliable ones being government-funded services, -- housing, health care, and education. In the 1980s, 80 percent of medical practices were owned by doctors.

Today, they’re owned and run by businessmen, and well over half of U.S. hospitals are running in the red (chiefhealthcareexecutive.com). Private equity companies are buying hospitals, nursing homes, emergency rooms and urgent care centers to flip them (sell at a profit). Then the private companies return the favor with political campaign contributions and donations. The privatization of our basic services is a crippling fascist attack on the working class, leading to a failed healthcare system, failed schools, and cities where workers cannot afford to live.   

Workers getting fed up
With decades of flat wages, part-time and temporary jobs, and forced overtime, workers are getting fed up! Even before the pandemic the number of strikes hit a 17 year high in 2019. Last year we witnessed a 39 percent increase in the number of strikes than the previous year, including teachers, nurses, graduate students, and journalists (axios.com).

Railroad workers came close to striking this year after their bosses cut the workforce by 30 percent over the past six years, expecting fewer workers to run longer trains at full capacity as often as possible. But their strike was derailed by the Democrats when they supported the union - busting bill that forced the rail workers to accept an unlivable contract.

We need a working-class movement that makes a clean break with the liberal politicians, fascists in the making who pretend to be our friends. Only communists can build a movement that sides uncompromisingly with workers because we are committed to fighting for an egalitarian world without classes, racism, sexism, and borders, where the wealth of society is shared.

Communists won power in the 20th century, raising the lives of workers across the globe, and then they lost it (in China and Russia and internationally) because they compromised their principles. Progressive Labor Party is building a new international communist movement.