This is why the fight for better wages and staffing at Kaiser is inseparably bound up with fight to end the pandemic. In almost every country, the line is that workers must remain on the job, where millions will get sick and die, in the name of profit. While hospitals have been starved of funds and public health programs are all but non-existent, trillions of dollars have been funneled into the banks and Wall Street. Their aim, put bluntly, is to sacrifice human life for profit. The demands by Kaiser are only a particularly grotesque expression of a general policy pursued by the entire capitalist oligarchy. The “non-profit” hospital chain, which made $5 billion last year, would much rather spend this money on executive compensation than on health care. The consequences can be measured in human lives. These measures will lower the standard of care amid a pandemic as more experienced nurses are forced out and replaced with cheaper replacements. The demands by Kaiser for massive cuts in real wages, with a pay increase five points below current inflation, and the creation of a new second tier of nurses making 30 percent less, is nothing short of criminal. Similar tragedies have taken place at auto plants, schools and other workplaces throughout the world. Healthcare workers have worked for over a year and a half under warlike conditions in hospitals, and nurses are leaving their profession at an unprecedented rate, citing low pay, overwork, and trauma. While workers everywhere are fighting to demand wage increases above the rate of inflation, adequate staffing levels and other critical workplace demands, they must also take up the fight against the catastrophe caused by the incompetent and criminal response of the ruling class to the pandemic. In addition, 60,000 film workers in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) are voting on a widely unpopular tentative agreement, which if rejected, raises the prospect of a strike that shuts down much of the entertainment industry. Major strikes are also underway in other industries, including by 10,000 John Deere workers, 1,400 Kellogg’s cereal workers and 1,100 Warrior Met coal miners. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers in Britain, Sri Lanka, Germany, Portugal, Kenya, Pakistan, Canada and elsewhere are also on the move.
In other parts of the country, 700 nurses at Tenet Healthcare in Massachusetts have been on strike for eight months, and 1,000 health care workers in West Virginia have been on strike for more than a week. In California, a one-day sympathy strike of 58,000 hospital workers on November 18 and a strike by 2,500 pharmacists, as well as the ongoing strikes in by 700 stationary and biomedical engineers at Kaiser and 350 workers at Sutter Health, mean that close to 100,000 health care workers may be on strike this week. The struggle at Kaiser is part of a broader upsurge of the working class. On Monday, 32,000 health care workers at Kaiser will go on strike, barring a last-minute effort by the union to shut it down.
0 kommentar(er)
