The Hollywood Strike Expanded | UAW SEIU-UHW RUNAP OTHERS
Strike then! With these recent positive results as evidence strike for better treatment and change in your workplace! The modern age affords you a far better chance than the ironworkers and seamstresses of The Appeal's original era.
It's been over three months since The Appeal called for expanding the strike efforts of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) to other industries, places, and people in the United States. The WGA strike is since resolved, but SAG-AFTRA and completely unrelated others have been continuing their fights.
Jim Blufftwat
In that time major bargaining updates have been posted by labor organizations mentioned in the previous installment. The Rochester Union of Nurses and Allied Professionals (RUNAP) have completed negotiations and speak positively of the resulting progress:
RGH’s package included a very fair contract offer of an average 22% increase [...] which is very competitive with hospitals across the region and nationally.
The hospital also moved substantially on the important issue of staffing, and agreed to include staffing concepts in the contract, as well as added for the first time monetary penalties when staffing levels are not in compliance under the terms of the contract.
Full terms and agreements have not been made public, but as the organization describes the offer as "very fair," and compares it both regionally and nationally, it is a very good sign.
This is an unequivocally positive result. Let us remind you of the situation prior to the RUNAP strike. From Expand the Hollywood Strike:
Nurses in Rochester, NY have no choice. Profit minded health systems have, for years, made decision after decision that worsens patient outcomes, and slides the responsibility for lapses of care onto the providers. Running ratios of patients to nurses sometimes double the recommended standard RUNAP report that within their system hospital-acquired infection rates are sometimes close to 90% higher than average. The union further states that as patient-nurse ratios increase, mortality and re-admission rates also significantly increase.
Capitalist healthcare systems make it impossible to resolve humane treatment with profit operations, and force more pain and suffering than is necessary by ignoring fact to the point where the labor that allows the system to exist at all is pushed far beyond their means.
The standing ovation RUNAP and the nurses it represents that is oh so dearly deserved is then unfortunately denied; stolen away by the need to stand not to applaud, but to form another picket line, in another place and time.
Where is it then we should land? To keep our tune so far requires I inform you of the, and take a breath for this one, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West Union's (SEIU-UHW) three day strike; since resolved. This historic strike resulted in new legislature being passed in the state of California explicitly setting a $25 minimum wage for healthcare workers.
Hannah Sweiss and Kiki Okpala © Fisher Phillips
Though the union was able to change law in California, it took workers for Kaiser Permanente facilities in many US states; Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Additionally, as the number of striking workers totaled more than 75,000, it was the largest healthcare strike in US history. The concerns forcing this strike match exactly those altered by the Rochester (RUNAP) strike, covering wages as discussed above, while also including the same staffing issues, and adding things like wait times and shift length.
We can re-tune, adjust your dials now reader, as we hone in on not a theme of healthcare but of timelines! The Kaiser Permanente/SEIU-UHW strike lasted not but three days. Three days it took to break the corporate grip in Vallejo, California, and across towards Colorado, and D.C.
Hark back to March of this year then, where for three days the SEIU Local 99 representing school custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and other school support staff shut down the second largest school district in the country, the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD.) Here as well it took only three days for the invisible hand that keeps the lights in school on, feeds your children, and conveys them safely to and from school. They are the hardworking blood cells of LA's public schools and they had the power to shut school down for three days until their demands were met. Local 99 had not replied to request for comment at the time of publication.
Strike then! With these recent positive results as evidence strike for better treatment and change in your workplace! The modern age affords you a far better chance than the ironworkers and seamstresses of The Appeal's original era. If they threaten you with or introduce to violence do not submit! Catalog the evidence and see if you can use our digitally connected moment to scour their sin with the light of truth! Strike! Strike!
Strike the iron and bend the sheet! Don't stare at the arc the robotic welders strike as they fuse Ram 2500s together. The sounds of a hammer striking an anvil haven't rung out of United States automotive factories in decades, but if they did regularly they would now be conspicuously absent, as the focus of our attention drifts away from the starkly light side linoleum corridors of healthcare facilities and onto grassy curbs outside sprawling industrial campuses in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas. These are the places America's giant road trucks are made, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union that bargains for the people that build them just keep upping the ante.
Mike Smith
Strikes have now been called for all "Big Three" automotive manufactures, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, and the messaging the union has been putting out has been constant and goes deep on automotive industry labor tiering, wages and cost of living, healthcare, retirement, time off, and more.
"Another record quarter, another record year. As we've said for months: record profits equal record contracts." said UAW President Shawn Fain. "It’s time GM workers, and the whole working class, get their fair share."
Since the strike was originally announced over a month ago, it has expanded nearly every week, and each time it expands, it garners both additional attention in the mainstream media, but also larger and larger swathes of the workforce.
Chris Isidore,Vanessa Yurkevich
TOM KRISHER
Remember the Battle for Blair Mountain
While national healthcare strikes have passed legislature, UAW documents attempt to draw attention again to California lawmakers, where instead of passing bills Newsom is now vetoing them. A.B. 504 attempted to prohibit language barring public-sector employees from collective bargaining.
"[...] Workers at UC had to strike for 40 days to force UC to bargain in good faith. AB 504 would have promoted an equal playing field in collective bargaining by giving every public worker the right to respect their fellow workers’ picket lines. California should be a leader in leveling the playing field between workers and employers.”
As the quote mentions this bill would have been forefront in protecting workers in California but the institution of State there would rather attempt the route sought by West Virginia over a hundred years ago. The short of it that a county in West Virginia would fire you if you were in a union. Here we have not only an entire state in the union eyeing workers and firing them if they attempt to stand together, but one of the states both perceived of as "liberal," and the largest economy in America, and even pretty high in the world, being 5th, behind Germany.
But no they'd rather keep their workers striking for 40 days just for air conditioning. If they hire any Pinkertons, run.
The Marxists.org Digital Archive of Appeal To Reason doesn't include anything past 1914, and so the current editors of The Appeal can't bring any internal historical context. It can, however, bring gratitude that in the year 2023 there have been multiple record-setting strikes, and none have ended with loss of life due to anti-union activities, private, state, or otherwise. The history of organized labor in the United States is painted with the blood of oppressed and exploited workers, and another record-setting event from history were a series of skirmishes between striking West Virginia miners and local lawmen escalated to all out war, with Federal air assets dropping World War I leftovers on hungry Americans in Appalachia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed rebellion outside of the civil war, and a distant milestone for the victories of today's labor unions.
We certainly haven't been able to compile an exhaustive list of the strikes or victories won this year, but The Appeal will continue to monitor strike activity and may bring you associated projects in the near future. It may be scary, but a strike may be able to make your life, everyone's lives, a lot easier.
Chris Isidore
