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NEWS & LETTERS, APRIL 2003
Workshop TalksWar hits workers
by Htun Lin Even before the first bomb of Bush's war fell, workers
back home were suffering from domestic collateral damage. Deep cuts in
California threaten the jobs of 10,000 teachers. In economically depressed areas
like Oakland where I work, the cutbacks are the severest. The Oakland school board warned that up to 1,000
teachers, one third of the total, are facing layoffs. Teachers are in a state of
uncertainty over who will be gone tomorrow. For teachers, students and parents,
education is the latest aspect of homeland insecurity. A few short years ago there was a state surplus. There
was an effort to reverse the decades-long neglect of education by hiring more
teachers. This ray of hope motivated a lot of young people to go into the
profession. However, they are learning that for capitalist planners human
concerns are always expendable. Many teachers say that if they are laid off they
will not return to this profession. This is true especially for those who put all their
energy into a promising new small school program that Oakland is going to
discontinue. Small schools were aimed at those who were dropping out. Planners
project that there is going to be an even more dramatic shortage of teachers for
the next decade. Once a public good is dismantled, it is very difficult to put
it back together again. We experienced this in health care over a decade of
restructuring. Staffing levels have been cut so drastically that wards are
understaffed as a matter of course. Every manager is called on the carpet for
being a penny over budget. There has been a massive depopulation of health care
professionals. A lot of veteran nurses, once they were given pink slips, never
returned to the field. Now nursing schools have a shortage of applicants and
there is a critical shortage of nurses in the wards. Management is offering
thousands of dollars as a reward for finding a successful candidate for a
nursing job. The shortage is so severe that they throw a lot of money to
subcontracting personnel agencies, which bring in nurses from afar. These nurses
are not familiar with our hospital routines and patient population. Our current
nursing contract includes a landmark quality care clause. Quality care
means you can't treat nurses as mere replacement parts in an assembly line. LABOR CONTRACTORS Capitalists like to delude themselves about their
ability to allocate resources efficiently. Resources for them are a quantitative
abstraction, which they can manipulate from their corporate suites. Workers know
that any human endeavor is a cooperative one. In health care or education,
cooperation of living labor creates an accumulation of knowledge and experience
in the group as a whole, which cannot be replaced with discrete quantities of
labor provided by temporary agencies. Cooperation, like Humpty Dumpty, cannot be easily put
back together. The bean counters congratulate us during employee forums for the
company's "fiscal health." The shop floor reality is ignored by their
illusion that managing money is managing health care. This illusion is magnified on a national scale by Bush's
health policies. One of the latest is to take more money out of Medicare by
forcing patients into HMOs in order to obtain prescription drug benefits and to
diminish Medicare patients ability to appeal denials for care. Bush also wants
to shift more of the federal government's responsibility for Medicaid to the
states. The one area where there is absolutely no restraint is
Bush's permanent war. Schools and hospitals are expendable. Management has
defended health care cutbacks because of massive reduction in health
expenditure. They say that the new reality in health care means we're going to
have to collect ever-increasing co-payments from individual patients. While Bush is hell bent on dismantling health care as we
know it, to him, his one health issue above all others is the possibility of
bio-terrorism. The Bush homeland security apparatus has obligated local
health agencies to prepare for mass inoculations beginning with us health
workers. Health professionals know that hundreds are expected to die from the
smallpox vaccine itself. HOODWINK PUBLIC One local health official said it is reckless for the
Bush regime to use vaccinations and jeopardize the health of millions to market
this war. She felt Bush is trying to hoodwink the public into believing that
authorities are doing something to protect them when in reality they are not. The everyday reality for us workers under capitalism is that the health of workers and the education of our children are sacrificed to the needs of capital. Nurses and teachers know better than generals that it takes a long time to build a working system, which once dismantled is difficult to put back together. How will planners rebuild what they are destroying right here at home--our health and educational infrastructures. Bush's permanent war is also a war against workers, and is forcing many of us to question the whole system. |
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