Portside

Can striking nurses, replacements hospital work together?

NYC teachers and nurses shine a light on the state of schools and hospitals as we near two years of the pandemic. Can workplace organizing stave off collapse and win a transformative political agenda?

Rather than materially address the underlying issues of the nursing shortage crisis, health care providers are exploiting it in order to further consolidate power at the top of industry hierarchies — and break the power of organized labor below.

The Kaiser Permanente partnership finds itself in crisis as 34,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers prepare to strike on Monday, in what would be the largest walkout in this fall’s strike wave.

Tenet Healthcare Continues to Retaliate Against Nurses for Exercising Their Right to Advocate for Better Care

Catholic Health has spent the pandemic buying real estate instead of fixing understaffing issues that overburden workers and put patients’ lives at risk. Mercy Hospital workers have walked off the job to demand new priorities.

The nonprofit research group Good Jobs First found that Tenet had been fined at least $1.8 billion since the St. Vincent nurses’ last strike in 2000.

The labor movement will not survive at all, let alone build power, without a serious racial analysis and making racial justice key to their core mission.

Many workers are turning to unions as they say say employers and government systems that are meant to protect them have failed.