September 21 Labor News Roundup
Workers won the biggest union victory in the South in a decade, struck over unsafe campuses, and used their workplace as a platform for racial justice protests.
Healthcare
Nurses at HCA Healthcare in Asheville, NC voted 965-411 to form a union, the largest private sector new organizing win of the year so far and the largest union win in the South for more than a decade. The campaign was triggered in part when for-profit multi-billion dollar healthcare conglomerate HCA Healthcare bought the formerly not-for-profit hospital for $1,500,000,000.
"Only a few months into the HCA buyout, we started to see dramatic decreases in the amount of staff and resources we had across the hospital,” Sue Fischer, a Mission nurse, said in a press release after the ballot count. “The nurse-to-patient ratios started to get much worse, equipment was replaced with cheaper versions, and certified nurse assistants, housekeepers, security, and phlebotomists, along with many other staff were let go in unprecedented levels.”
“We’re all thrilled that we’ve finally won,” said Lesley Bruce, a registered nurse, who works in chest pain observation at Mission. In her statement, she added, “This victory means we can use our collective voice to advocate for patient safety and safer staffing.”
4,000 service and professional workers at the University of Illinois-Chicago joined 800 nurses from the University of Illinois Hospital on strike Monday, with more than 1,000 workers taking part in a march and public demonstration. The UIC workers will stay on strike indefinitely, though different laws for hospital strikes mean the nurses’ strike must end by Friday at the latest.
Workers at Western State Hospital in Washington state say that management is failing to protect them from assaults, causing injuries and turnover in the chronically understaffed facility. Western State Hospital lost its Medicare and Medicaid accreditation two years ago for “repeated health and safety violations.”
“It’s disheartening. You see an ambulance come not to bring a patient but to take one of your peers out of here because our management fails to staff this facility,” John Henson, a mental health technician at Western State Hospital, told The Associated Press. “Our members are getting hurt, getting beat up.” [...]
“We’ve lost more staff than I can count because of this, either they’re too injured to return to work or they’re afraid to return,” [Mike] Yestramski said. “I’m sick and tired of seeing my friends/coworkers get injured (sometimes permanently) and I’m sick and tired of explaining to their loved ones why their employer allowed this to happen.”
A new study found that the COVID-19 mortality rate in unionized nursing homes was 30% lower than the mortality rate in non-union nursing homes.
Healthcare workers conducting random coronavirus testing in neighborhoods across Minnesota as part of a research study were confronted by an armed group of citizens in the course of their work.
A union representing healthcare workers in Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, and Illinois settled a class action lawsuit brought by the National Right To Work Foundation, an organization engaged in a national campaign to reduce union membership. The settlement forces the union to accept withdrawal requests solicited by anti-union organizations and drop their requirement for photo identification for withdrawal requests.
OSHA fined hospitals in Paramus, New Jersey and Shreveport, Louisiana for failing to provide proper PPE to protect their workers from the coronavirus.
Education
Graduate student instructors at the University of Michigan went on strike over unsafe campus conditions. When the university administration offered concessions, the union voted overwhelmingly to reject them and continue their strike. The university administration then took legal action against the workers, seeking a restraining order and injunction since it is officially illegal for public employees to go on strike. Eventually in the face of these legal threats, the union ended their strike and accepted a second settlement offer from the university.
The strike expanded to more than 100 residential advisers, who also went on strike over unsafe conditions in university dormitories despite not having a union. About 71% of RAs voted to strike, as did about 79% of graduate student instructors. Student dining hall workers also staged a slowdown in support of the striking workers after threats of retaliation from Michigan Dining forced them to abandon their original plan to join the strike.
A 28-year-old teacher in South Carolina died of the coronavirus. Earlier this summer, South Carolina’s governor Henry McMaster ordered all public schools to reopen with in-person classes.
In New York and Massachusetts, teachers protested by working outside, where coronavirus is less likely to spread.
Mississippi’s state auditor is investigating a professor at the University of Mississippi for participating in a work stoppage over racial justice. The auditor sent two state agents to the professor’s home and has called for his termination.
Farmworkers
Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest have left migrant workers homeless and crowded into mobile homes, as many migrant farmworkers continue working in brutal smoky conditions.
“Ever since the fire started, we’ve been staying at one of my aunt’s house,” said Anai Palacios [in eastern Washington], “And there’s about 11 people living there.”
Palacios, a leader in the migrant community, says the fires have devastated her family. They have lost everything.
Even during the smokiest days of September, Maricela, 48, continued working her typical eight-hour shifts at a vineyard in southern Oregon. The air burned her eyes and throat, she said.
Maricela, who migrated to Oregon from Mexico nearly a decade ago, makes $12 per hour and wires as much as she can back to Mexico to feed her children. She said she could not afford to miss work. Though Maricela normally gets along with her boss, she said she was angry that no economic safety net existed, either from her employer or government officials, to keep her from working in toxic air. She asked The World not to use her last name because she feared that speaking out could cost her job.
"It's dangerous to work in this air, but the bills don't wait,” Maricela said, who nearly lost her home as a fire swept through her own neighborhood. “And if I don't work, I don't get anything. My boss said he was sorry but the grapes needed picking.”
Firefighters
Meanwhile in California, inmate firefighters battling wildfires won the right to have their records expunged, allowing them to become professional firefighters after release from prison.
Census workers
A US Census manager ordered supervisors to begin layoffs of census workers in violation of a judge’s order to keep workers on staff as she considers whether to extend the deadline for the count by a month.
Census workers also say their work is being undermined by faulty technology, including a buggy app that crashes often and Apple devices without enough battery life to last their full shift.
"We've all started calling it 'The Senseless,'" said Hill, who has worked at the bureau's Seattle office for more than a year. "What I have been telling people who I'm training is, 'You really have to have zero expectations if you want to work here.'"
All workers
A new report from Oxfam America found that no state in America offers a minimum wage that reaches even half of a living wage. The report also ranks Washington as the best state to work and Virginia the worst, based on an index of wage standards, worker protections, and the right to organize a union. Not coincidentally, Washington was also found to have the strongest unions in the country and the second-greatest growth in union membership according to another recent study.
California will require employers to notify workers of coronavirus outbreaks at their workplaces, and will also make workers who catch coronavirus from an outbreak in their workplace eligible to receive workers’ compensation for the illness.
Monique Hernandez, a nurse, said nine of her fellow nurses were infected, though she works in an area called a “clean unit” where she does not have contact with coronavirus patients.
“There is no such thing as a clean unit when it comes to COVID-19,” she said. “I took that very personal.”
Missouri had the fastest growth in union membership of any state in the country according to a study by SmartAsset, followed by Washington state, Arizona, Colorado, and Rhode Island. The states with the biggest drop in membership were Iowa, Kentucky, Virginia, Alaska, and Idaho.
Beauty workers
One-third of nail salon workers in California said they would not be able to afford rent next month and hundreds said they might not be able to afford food or basic necessities. 90% of workers in California’s nail salon industry are women and 75% are of Vietnamese descent.
“I’m suffering,” [Lan Anh Truong, a nail salon owner in Alameda] says. “Right now I don’t have a job, and I don’t have enough money to pay for the rent. I miss customers, I miss working, I need money. I’m so scared.”
Food service
Workers at White Electric Coffee, in Providence, RI, formed a union and are now considering converting the business into a worker-owned cooperative.
“We hope our union model can be an inspiration to other food service and service sector workers, that organizing with your co-workers is possible and that there is power, too often unharnessed, in your collective voice.”
Food processing
OSHA fined a JBS meatpacking plant about $15,000 after hundreds of workers there got sick and 6 died from a coronavirus outbreak. Workers protested outside of the federal agency’s Denver office over the fine that the workers’ union called “insulting” and “ineffectual.” Written Up previously covered the culture of coming to work sick at this plant and a worker walkout that won meatpackers there a raise.
Media
Workers at the Hilton Head Island Packet newspaper in South Carolina organized a union. Katherine Kokal, a journalist for the paper, said the purpose of forming the union was to retain journalists.
“Our newspaper attracts really bright, young journalists, usually fresh out of school, usually for their first job, and then they leave. It's a really detrimental cycle to our mission of providing good local news and lasting relationships for people who are here,” [said reporter Katherine Kokal].
Machinists
4500 workers at Textron Aviation in Wichita, KS voted to ratify a new four year contract with the company, averting a threat to go on strike.
Sports
Matthew Stafford, quarterback for the Detroit Lions, wrote about why NFL players can’t just “stick to football” and must protest at their job over racial injustice.
Tech
The National Labor Relations Board found merit to a worker’s claim that Kickstarter broke federal labor law by firing him for organizing a union with his coworkers at the company.
"This should be a signal to workers that you can win, even as weakened and corrupted as the NLRB is by Trump's influence. You can still win. This is still a fight worth having," [Taylor] Moore told Motherboard. "Having witnessed it all firsthand, the evidence can't be clearer. I was coming off my best three quarters when I was fired and they never gave me or any one else a sufficient reason for termination."