BUFFALO, N.Y.
Health-care workers ratify historic contract
By Beverly
Hiestand, R.N.
Chief Steward, Nurses United
CWA Local 1168
Buffalo, N.Y.
Seventy-two hundred health-care workers in three unions
ratified a truly historic five-year contract on Nov. 30. The
pact was negotiated by a joint 16-unit bargaining committee
with the goliath Kaleida Health Corp. These unions included
Communications Workers Local 1168, Service Employees 1199
Upstate, and Operating Engineers Local 71.
Kaleida Health, a non-profit corporation, was formed in
1998. It merged five major hospitals, including their home
care and satellite facilities. Kaleida became the biggest
health-care conglomerate in New York state outside of New
York City.
This merger resulted in fewer available beds and
considerable downsizing of the combined work force.
The merger could have wiped out all pre-existing union
contracts, forcing the unions to start from scratch. But the
unions quickly waged a struggle to pressure Kaleida's
management to recognize all the existing bargaining units.
The unions won formal recognition in the corporation
charter.
At the same time, these unions won the right to have one
large negotiating committee representing 16 bargaining units
immediately negotiate an agreement to protect workers' rights
that were affected by the merger--including seniority,
transfer and job security rights.
They also won an agreement that all existing contracts
would expire on the same date to be replaced by a new joint
contract--the one signed on Nov. 30.
Organizing the unorganized
At the time of the merger over half the employees were not
organized--a weakness in future bargaining power. So the
unions bargained with hospital management and won the right
to organize the unorganized using a method of card check--or
simple recognition of the majority's sentiments--rather than
going through the more common, slower and less fair procedure
of a National Labor Relations Board election.
But to secure this, the unions gave up the right to strike
until the first contract was signed.
In the ensuing two years CWA was able to organize almost
all the remaining non-management employees. Now there are
twice as many unionized workers as before the merger.
As negotiations approached and the contracts neared
expiration, the unions mobilized worker and community
pressure on management. They organized slowdowns,
work-to-rule actions and informational picketing to build
support for the bargaining committee's demands.
For the first time, nurses' aides, housekeepers, nurses,
respiratory therapists and cafeteria workers all picketed
together.
There are strengths and weaknesses in the new contract.
But most important, it returns the unions' right to
strike.
The contract also provides pay raises of up to 35 percent
for some of the lowest paid workers. And it gets rid of pay
inequities in the same job categories that allow management
to move work to the lowest paid sites.
Adequate staffing--one of the most urgent issues facing
health care delivery here--was not resolved by the new
contract. The number of employees has been reduced to bare
bones because of cutbacks in Medicare funding and the overall
drive for profits in the health-care industry. So health-care
workers' unions here have been waging a larger campaign to
restore federal and state funding to health care and to
agitate for universal health care.
But unions alone can't win this. No contract will solve
the health-care crisis that has become a life-and-death issue
in this country today.
Racism, sexism, anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry are also
barriers that keep many from the quality care they so
deserve.
Almost 50 million documented workers--and untold numbers
of undocumented workers--are without health benefits.
Hospitals and doctors' offices turn away countless people
because they can't afford care.
Mergers exacerbate
health-care crisis
Pharmaceutical companies hold life-saving drugs for
ransom. The big insurance companies and HMOs are more
concerned with their profit margins than with patient care.
And giant mergers have led to more layoffs and speed-up for
health-care workers.
But breaking up these conglomerates and going back to
smaller, decentralized facilities is not the answer.
In fact, the mergers are creating a new relationship of
forces in the health-care industry. As the successful strikes
of the UPS and Verizon workers proved, giant conglomerates
haven't just made management more powerful; they have also
concentrated and unified a larger, more powerful work
force.
The private capitalist ownership of industry and banking,
driven by the profit motive, is a barrier to providing
quality health care for all.
The mergers set the stage for workers to take over these
industries lock, stock and barrel in order to create a
socialist economy based on planning to meet human needs.
Every socialist revolution has decreed that health care be
free of charge because it is a human right, not a privilege.
In a socialist economy, health-care workers sit down with the
communities they serve to determine how to ensure that
cost-free, quality health care is the right of every human
being.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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