A TRANSFORMATIVE TIME FOR WORKERS.

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Jaffe, Sarah
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Jaffe, Sarah

The nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, have been on strike for eight months. On March 8, they walked out after they were unable to reach a deal with the hospital's for-profit parent company, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, that would provide for staffing levels that nurses like Dominique Muldoon considered safe for patient care.

By August, the nurses and the hospital had reached a hard-won compromise. Muldoon, a member of the negotiating committee, says the deal would provide more support for nurses, bringing on resource nurses and assigning fewer patients to nurses who were looking after the sickest patients. "It would increase safety so much more," Muldoon told me in October at the nurses' strike headquarters across from the hospital.

The nurses thought they had an agreement that would let them return to work. Then the hospital informed them that it intended to keep some of the replacement nurses in their positions--meaning that longtime nurses who'd been on strike would lose their jobs. "They're trying to send a message to other unionized nurses and probably nonunionized nurses in their other hospitals," says Marie Ritacco, another Saint Vincent nurse and vice president at the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA).

Thousands of workers, in health care and outside of it, have gone on strike or voted to do so this year, as the pandemic wears on and bosses attempt to return to "normal." Those workers have been on the front lines for almost two years and have realized, to put it bluntly, that management doesn't care if they die. The Saint Vincent nurses remind us that everyone has a breaking point and that so many of us have reached it in this time of cascading crises--and the length of their struggle reminds us just how hard it is to win under a political economic system designed to wring every last dollar from workers' sweat, blood, and tears.

"It is a transformative time, and we feel it more so now than on March 8," Ritacco says. "The pandemic has changed everything, and it's an opportunity. I feel like we are right at the forefront. So, although it's been really difficult, I consider us fortunate to help lead the way because I think we can make a difference."

The year 2021 has been one of worker anger boiling over. When those workers, like most Americans, are unorganized and unionless, the result has been what commentators are now calling the "Great Resignation," with a record 4.3 million quitting their jobs in...