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NEWS & LETTERS, February 2008 - March 2008Workshop TalksThe allies SEIU picksby Htun Lin In 1997, SEIU, under the direction of John Sweeney and Andy Stern, engineered a partnership with management where I work at Kaiser. That deal undercut the ongoing strike actions by health workers, led by nurses. We wanted a say not only about the day-to-day quality of our work, but also the fundamental meaning of our work, the meaning of healthcare. Instead we were ordered to join the effort to cut costs to enhance the company's bottom line. Now SEIU has partnered with not only nursing home owners, but also Gov. Schwarzenegger's effort to undermine a genuine universal healthcare plan by manufacturing a fake one written by HMO executives. Recently Sal Rosselli, our longtime leader in SEIU Local 250 (now called Health Care Workers West), was expressing second thoughts about his boss, SEIU's International President Andy Stern. Stern plans to trade away workers' and patients' interests for a nod by bosses at HMOs and nursing homes to grant him the sole right to conduct membership drives in their shops. On Feb. 9, Rosselli sent a long letter to Stern, detailing Stern's "undemocratic practices" and resigning from the SEIU Executive Committee. Rosselli now has qualms about Stern's plans to endorse Schwarzenegger's anti-worker healthcare plan, but his approach is still top down, as it was ten years ago, when Rosselli sided with the Labor Management Partnership at Kaiser, without consulting workers on strike fighting the alienation in their work. That action is what brought him to his conflicted state today. SMALL UNIVERSE When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparred over healthcare in their debate in Los Angeles, Clinton repeated her intention to make healthcare universal for all. But her plan is not that much different from the kind of insurance industry written "universal healthcare" pushed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in California. That legislation was meant to force individuals to buy health insurance or else--even if it busts your family's budget. One could be punished for not having health insurance, much the way California punishes drivers who fail to have auto insurance. Obama, on the other hand, stressed that universal health insurance won't make a difference if people can't afford to buy it. He says affordability is the issue. So his solution is to "make healthcare more affordable by lowering cost." Tell that to my co-workers at the HMO. We've undergone over ten years of cost-cutting measures imposed by the company, which brought us deep cuts in care-provider staffing and other healthcare resources. Patients' access to care was undermined by the introduction of huge co-pays. LOWERING CARE Cost-cutting measures only made things worse for us workers with speed-up and chronically shortchanged patients because of inadequate care. The net effect, however, boosts the company's bottom line. In my shop today, what used to be unacceptable substandard care when I was first hired two decades ago has become business as usual. One worker recently became ill and had to use aliases and false addresses in order to get emergency care. He said that the healthcare industry has become the bane in our lives. The number one cause of destruction and ruin in our personal lives and finances is the healthcare system. Long before the subprime mortgage debacle caused so many individuals to lose their homes, illness in the family would swallow up many people's life savings. Even when bureaucrats like Rosselli and Stern, and politicians running for high office, are in opposition to the status quo and "for" the workers, what they fail to see is that we workers are not only against what is. They don't engage our efforts on the shop floor to work out what we are for, a new kind of non-alienating labor. Karl Marx said the ultimate problem, which needs to be confronted in a protracted battle until its destruction, is the individual's enslavement to the division between mental and manual labor. Politicians and labor bureaucrats like Rosselli keep thinking the answer is a new faction. New factions keep emerging as long as the focus of attention is away from the workers' struggle to overcome alienation in production. |
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