Listen: DNC Wrap Up; PA Nurses Set to Strike…
West Penn Hospital nurses are prepared to go on strike--we get an update.
By Bob Hennelly
It’s the Monday morning after the Democratic National Committee’s Chicago Convention and Vice President Kamala Harris is off to a strong start headed into the first presidential debate with former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia Sept. 10.
The stakes are high for labor considering how the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 targets basic worker protections and long-standing labor law that goes back to FDR’s New Deal.
As Jenny Brown pointed out in her Labor Notes column last month, the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 playbook has already been applied in Florida where public sector unions are required to recertify every year with 60 percent of the bargaining unit paying dues. By April that had meant 28 unions disappeared and 42,000 public sector workers lost their union protections.
Work-Bites’ Steve Wishnia also highlighted how Project 2025 paves the way for Medicare “Dis-Advantage” to replace traditional Medicare.
While the nation has seen a dramatic jump in the number of workplaces where workers are trying to establish a union, actual union density is still stuck just a little bit above 10 percent. That’s half of what it was before President Reagan summarily fired all of the striking air traffic controllers in the early 1980s. And as union density declined, working families fell further and further behind as wealth concentration exploded to obscene levels.
On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, AFGE President Dr. Everett Kelley and 32BJ SEIU President Manny Pastreich share their thoughts about the Chicago convention.
In the second half of the show we get an update from Liz Puffenberger, an RN and member of SEIU Healthcare PA. The union recently voted overwhelmingly to go on strike at Pittsburgh’s West Penn Hospital in large part to protest inadequate staffing.
As previously reported, it was the lack of basic equipment like N-95 masks and adequate hospital staffing going into the pandemic that led to the loss of infection control—and the deaths of over 1.1 million Americans—including 3,600 healthcare workers, 800 of which came from the NYC metropolitan area.
We are 4 percent of the world’s population and were 12 percent of the world’s COVID deaths with the nation’s poorest zip codes bearing the brunt of the pandemic. So far, the only entity holding America’s grotesque for-profit healthcare system and their beltway enablers accountable for this mass death event are our healthcare unions.
Listen to the entire show below: