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NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006Workshop TalksSaying 'no' saves a lifeby Htun Lin In February, Gov. Schwarzenegger, in the last appeal for death row inmate Michael Morales, decided he should die. Morales was convicted in 1983 of the brutal rape and murder of a teenage girl. His execution would add to a long list of those who perished since California revived the death penalty. Executions at San Quentin State Prison had been conducted cleanly and swiftly, without much incident, before Morales. There were, of course, the vigils of several hundred to perhaps a few thousand outside the gates. Bearing witness to yet another state sanctioned murder, these vigils remind the rest of society of the uncivilized basis of our “civilization.” DEATH CHAMBER NO-SHOW In contrast to the noisy demonstration outside, inside the death chamber a quiet routine unfolds methodically. The journalists, the state officials, the families of the victims all know their proper places. This time, however, the court mandated an additional licensed professional, an anesthesiologist. Even the condemned knew his role. He knew to climb onto the deathbed, which eerily resembled a hospital gurney, where he would be strapped in. As the needle was inserted into his veins, perhaps he would remember the gratitude he felt toward another health worker when a similar needle delivered a cure for a serious infection--the kind of gratitude I am reminded of by all the “thank you” notes patients leave behind in the hospital where I work. Morales’ execution never took place. The health worker never showed up. The American Medical Association (AMA) didn’t give him the blessing to do so. This “non event” was headline news around the world. This time there was no autopsy. Instead, the examination was of the body politic and American “civilization” was on trial. State officials thought their machinery of death was well oiled. Everything fit perfectly. Except they forgot that the worker is subject, and not just an appendage to the machine. Not even one press article saw this as a labor story, but it was. It was the question of labor, “labor ethics” if you will, posed by medical workers, which succeeded in stopping the death penalty. Before this, nothing made any significant dent in denying the right of a state to extinguish an individual life. The California death penalty has finally met its match--in California labor. The misogynist “Governator” had already met his match in the recent battles with California’s nurses, when he tried to gut their hard-won improvement in nurse-patient ratio. Frontline healthcare workers over the last decade began to ask the questions, what is healthcare? What kind of labor should health workers do? That questioning was so infectious that it reached up all the way to the AMA, which now reminded all doctors that they were bound by the Hippocratic Oath. But this movement was begun by those of us at the very bottom, with the aides, the housekeepers, and the clerks, as well as the nurses, who took on restructuring and managed care, which we call “mangled care.” THINKING FOR OURSELVES What do we value in life? What is life? What is government’s place in promoting the meaning of life? These questions were already immanent in our daily work on the shop floor, long before a Terri Schiavo propelled this quandary into the forefront of our collective consciousness. Hucksters, con artists, right-to-lifers and legislators tripped over themselves embracing Schiavo while ready to pull the switch on Michael Morales on death row, or a Medicaid patient on her deathbed. Even the most highly trained medical professionals, doctors, are forced to ask the question, “With all the sophisticated training I have received, why am I reduced to the status of an automaton, instructed to merely manipulate the instruments of my labor, this time to be applied to produce death, while state bureaucrats do all the thinking for me?” On that night there was a virtual presence of hundreds of thousands of health workers outside the gates of San Quentin. Hovering above the death chamber, like a ghost, was the unrelenting questioning by healthcare workers of the meaning of their labor, which challenges the domination of the State’s prerogatives over issues of life and death. |
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