This And That Of A Tuesday Afternoon
Surf, strike, ride a bike
Links are at the end.
The photo is from Waimea Bay in 2016. That’s the last year the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational was held, although this picture isn’t from that event. The contest requires very large, rideable waves within a given window, and those don’t come along every year. For a minute the contest seemed on for tomorrow but the conditions deteriorated; I might go up there anyway to see if anyone’s on the water, as it’s impossible to get close the days the event is held. Another giant swell is predicted for two weeks from now, so there’s hope.1
Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!
2022 saw a lot more attention paid unions and labor generally than is usual, what with the Starbucks unionization efforts, the potential railroad strike and other happenings large and small.2 That has spilled over into 2023, most prominently with various nurse’s union units either threatening strikes or going out over low pay and critical understaffing.3
Hospitals received $175 billion in COVID-related aid during the pandemic, helping to boost profit margins — but little of that money trickled down to employees. At the end of September 2022, Montefiore was sitting on $1.3 billion in cash and investments, while Mount Sinai had $2.6 billion at the end of 2020.
The nurses’ union contracts with the hospitals expired at the end of last year. Labor negotiations for a new contract broke down due to the ongoing staffing crisis in the hospitals, as well as over demands for language mandating that minimum staffing levels are actually enforced.
Left out of all of the corporate media’s current coverage of the strike are the enormous profits and hefty executive compensation packages enjoyed by the hospitals in question. While Montefiore and Mount Sinai are technically nonprofits, they frequently act like large corporations — with massive investments on Wall Street and overseas, and providers sidelined from essential care decision-making.
The pandemic has been really tough on health care workers generally, not just nurses, but the nurses are the ones charged with the bulk of patient care, and they’ve been accumulating more responsibilities with less power, and with wages that fall farther and farther behind conditions.
Along with successes in retail, like the Starbucks workers, some 7,000 of whom are unionized now, journalists had a decent organizing year4, including the first journalists’ union at a Texas newspaper—ever.
Before launching the labor strike on November 28—likely the first open-ended newsroom work stoppage in Texas history—Kaley Johnson, a justice reporter at the Star-Telegram and vice president of the paper’s union, the Fort Worth NewsGuild, said negotiations were largely stuck in the mud. The Star-Telegram, which serves the state’s fifth-largest city and politically crucial Tarrant County, is owned by the McClatchy Company, a chain of about 30 papers nationwide. In turn, McClatchy is now controlled not by the family that ran it from the 19th century until 2020, but by the New Jersey-based hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. These corporate profiteers, per Johnson, were unwilling to move from a wage floor of $45,000 or consider other demands for months on end.
“The main reason we went on strike was because they weren’t negotiating at all; they were committed to stalling tactics and stonewalling,” she said. Once the work stoppage began, McClatchy swiftly cut off health insurance for the strikers and even posted temporary jobs to replace the journalists. Meanwhile, the workers raised some $51,000 on GoFundMe to sustain the effort. Suddenly, a few weeks into the stoppage, the company offered a new wage floor of $52,000 for current employees and $50,000 for future hires, along with other concessions on layoff procedures and bereavement leave.
“It appears that the longer we were on strike, the more pressure they did feel to compromise with us, and that ultimately is what led to us being able to have those wins … so I guess striking does work,” Johnson said.
As you all probably know, newspapers large and small are increasingly owned by hedge funds, as the McClatchy chain is now, and pirate equity companies, neither of which are known as big fans of journalism or labor unions, and some of which are much more interested in the real estate newspapers sit on than in the newspapers themselves.
So it’s good that the Ft. Worth reporters will be earning close to a living wage at least for a while.
And strike some more
Members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) at Kaiser Permanente in Hawai’i have been on strike since the end of August 2022; at issue is Kaiser’s continuing refusal to hire enough psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists to provide timely mental health care for the HMO’s members.
In a major victory for Hawai’i patients and NUHW members that have been on strike for more than three months, the state’s largest health insurance purchaser is allowing members to leave Kaiser Permanente if they report being unable to access timely mental health care from the giant HMO.
Under normal circumstances, members of the Hawaii Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund (EUTF) who want to switch insurers outside of the open enrollment window must file an appeal that is investigated by the Trust Fund and voted on by its Board of Trustees. But amid growing concerns that Kaiser members cannot access timely mental health care with its therapists on strike for more than three months, the trustees voted to create an expedited appeals process that will allow members to leave Kaiser without any investigation as long as their reason for switching is that they are receiving inadequate access to mental health care.
With the EUTF providing health insurance to nearly 200,000 active and retired public employees and their dependents, the move was big news in Hawai’i with coverage by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Honolulu Civil Beat, KITV, Hawaii News Now, Becker’s Hospital Review and Hawaii Public Radio. The Star-Advertiser also wrote an editorial supporting the move.
Kaiser once had a good reputation on labor issues, but no longer.
You can contribute to the Hawai’i local’s strike fund here, if you’re so moved.5
Music to have written by
Superchunk, “Wild Loneliness;”6 The Paranoyds, "Talk Talk Talk ;"7 Sofie Royer, “Harlequin.”8
And that, comrades, is all I got. Everybody strike, on three.
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I'm reminded of the apparent fact that inflation seems to have been created as much by massive profit taking as by any other factor, including labor.
Eddie'd Go!
Hawai'ian labor is geographically constrained. It's an imperialistic employers' dream.