Workshop Talks
November 2000

Regaining control of our labor

by Htun Lin

We service workers at Kaiser HMO have now been presented with a new nationally consolidated contract. The contract is touted as a great triumph of the strategic partnership between Kaiser management and the AFL-CIO. There are some good things in the contract, like giving benefits to domestic partners and extending coverage to unmarried children up to age 25. Union officials are saying the 4% per year raise over five years is a great victory. However, locking us into that wage structure for such a long time can be dangerous because anything can happen in this economy. Further, some of these wage increases are just making up lost ground from past wage freezes. Those freezes, along with speed-up and cuts in patient care, created Kaiser's new financial "health."

The biggest problem with this contract is the illusion projected by the union, that the benefits were won because of the union's strategic partnership with management. For example, the union claims they have won a say in staffing levels. The partnership language only calls for a "joint process for staffing" wherein partnership teams shall "recommend a staffing design within allocated organizational resources." Who do you think controls allocatable resources? Management and management alone.

The reason management even felt compelled to include novel but ineffectual language on staffing and quality patient care in a service workers' contract is precisely because there has been an intense prolonged struggle over these issues by independent unions driven by their rank-and-file's everyday struggle over quality care. It is that rank-and-file activity from the ground-up that resulted in the real contractual language on quality-care won in the landmark 1998 contract by the California Nurses Association.

At the time, the labor/management partnership undermined the rank-and-file solidarity with CNA pickets. CNA expanded their effort in a movement that included the working communities of Richmond and Oakland to stop Kaiser closures (medical red-lining). It was CNA's example that caught on.

In March 2000 registered nurses, nurses aides, lab-techs, pharmacists, and physician's assistants at Kaiser Permanente of Denver, Colo. represented by the United Commercial and Food Workers' Union won key provisions for quality care and a contractual obligation not to use sub-contractors even during labor shortages. The quality care provision was modeled after the 1998 victory by the CNA.

Rank-and-filers' taking ownership of the patient care issue is the underlying source for many new health-care work actions such the current strikes against Catholic Health Care West and Sutter in the Bay Area.

The irony is that the AFL-CIO's new partnership slogan, "Working Together Works!," used to be our slogan for a genuine partnership between all the unions (including CNA) against management. No amount of accommodationist rhetoric like this nor nationally consolidated agreements emerging out of this labor/management partnership can deny the objectivity of the fundamental conflict: the drive by managed care to restructure and ration healthcare, based on capital's needs, is opposed by the ongoing rank-and-file opposition on the shop floor in order to regain control of our labor.