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California nurses union plans holiday strike over PPE
- minikites 6y agoThis is a good example of why labor unions are important and necessary. A single nurse can be ignored because of the massive power imbalance between an individual and the management collective of a large organization. Nurses banding together to create their own collective creates a level playing field for negotiations.
- toiletfuneral 6y agoevery person who downvoted this is a bootlicker
- _jal 6y agoAnd note that this is not "just" for the good of nurses, although that would be a sufficient reason to do something about it (or strike if refused). We are talking about primary caregivers during a pandemic. This labor action is good for everyone.
- blululu 6y agoThe nurses in CA have been unionized for quite a while now. At the point that a strike is happening I’m not sure the union is having much success negotiating with the hospital over something that should be basic, obvious and mutually beneficial. One of the big complaints that people have about Unions (under US law) is that they do not really care so much about employee welfare as much as some specific set of bargaining points. The union just adds another large bureaucracy that you personally have minimal bargaining power with. (Last unionized job I had actually negotiated a salary decrease for us but claimed some ideological win over facilities). I feel like something closer to employee ownership/cooperative business models are a better approach to providing for human needs, and to that effect the NLRA should really be reworked.
- justin66 6y agoYou don't need to rework existing labor law for organized labor and employee ownership to coexist. ESOPs with unions were more popular prior to the Reagan era, but I don't believe they've been made illegal.
- blululu 6y agoTrue. My last statement should have been split into two separate proposals: 1.) Better legal/financial support for cooperative business models (the laws on the books are prohibitive for capital intensive projects). 2.) Revising the NLRA to allow competition among multiple unions for representation. Right to work laws are too far on this issue but unions should not simply exist as a monopoly, they should have to have some incentive to earn their members.
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- justin66 6y agoI'm not sure I understand #2. Today, workers can switch unions with a vote, right? If the argument is that the workforce at any given company should be represented by an arbitrary number of unions... I'd have to give that some thought, but it sounds like something that would occur in a post-scarcity science fiction world (a dystopia, or perhaps just an anti-union parody) wherein the future workforce consists almost entirely of lawyers. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad.
- quasse 6y agoI can confirm the "used PPE" thing from personal experience. My partner (a nurse at a VA hospital) was given a Tupperware container with holes poked in the lid as "overnight storage" for her N95 mask and was asked to reuse it for up to a month at a time. As far as I know this is still ongoing. I know the cynical take is "you need to stop letting yourself be surprised / disappointed by this kind of thing" but we should be able to do better, especially in a federally run hospital in the USA. My coworkers from mainland China were concerned about our well-being and started shipping us KN95 masks, even fairly early on in the pandemic. feelsbadman.jpg
- sieabahlpark 6y ago> I know the cynical take is "you need to stop letting yourself be surprised / disappointed by this kind of thing" but we should be able to do better, especially in a federally run hospital in the USA. You're talking about California, the literal state of poorly run government.
- j4yav 6y agoAs an outsider this is basically exactly what I would expect to happen in US healthcare.
- ashtonkem 6y agoAs an American, it has been incredibly demoralizing seeing one institution after another fail miserably. I didn’t have high expectations, but oh boy did we fall way short.
- vmchale 6y agoCDC was muzzled by Trump admin. and a lot of that cascaded downwards. But still, horrible to see.
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- cscurmudgeon 6y agoCalifornia was prepared for this a decade ago but squandered it. When the state budget swelled 14 years ago, Schwarzenegger launched a surge capacity stockpile that included mobile hospitals and medical gear intended to prepare California for a situation like it is facing today. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/schwarzenegger-shortsighted-for-california-to-defund-pandemic-stockpile-he-built-1269954 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/...
- NonEUCitizen 6y agoArnold was elected in a special election after a career politician was recalled.
- wcarron 6y agoThat is completely immaterial to the discussion
- vulcan01 6y agoIn defence of the OP, at risk of also getting downvoted :) I think what the OP is trying to say is that it is hard to imagine a career politician instituting such a program.
- _jal 6y agoYou mean, career politicians like the Bush administration, that stood up the Pandemic Response Team, that was subsequently dissolved by the Trump administration? That kind of career politician? Edit: Named the wrong admin, my memory was off.
- ravenstine 6y agoOnly the politicians we don't like are "career politicians", my friend. ;)
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- babesh 6y agoThis can easily be solved with a tiny bit of sense. The state of California has large stockpiles. Now would be the time to distribute some. EDIT: shows the state of Hacker News readership that this is downvoted when the article states this. Furthermore, here is a second source: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/07/22/governor-newsom-announces-enhanced-state-stockpile-purchase-of-420-million-new-protective-masks/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/07/22/governor-newsom-announces-... hitting the downvoted button because it offends their sensibility without reading articles or doing their own research.
- 24gttghh 6y agoCitation please? I find this incredibly hard to believe.
- dawnerd 6y agoThe article literally mentions it. While it may not be a large stockpile, there’s ppe to be had.
- babesh 6y ago1/2 a billion.
- babesh 6y agoDidn’t read the article did you?
- 24gttghh 6y agoThe article seems bogus. The state is in the process of getting masks out to people: """ As of Dec. 7, the state's PPE stockpile included: 178.7 million N95 respirators 339 million surgical masks 63.8 million procedure gowns 19.5 million face shields 152.2 million sets of protective gloves https://www.desertsun.com/story/money/business/2020/12/09/free-ppe-way-palm-springs-area-businesses-amid-stay-home-order/6482012002/ https://www.desertsun.com/story/money/business/2020/12/09/fr... """ That ain't half a billion N95 masks.
- dpeck 6y agoIt is absurd that there aren’t n95, and similarly effective, masks easily available 9 months into this thing.
- cronix 6y agoWhat's absurd is CA abandoning its $200M stockpile of PPE in order to save $5M a year about 9 years ago. That stockpiles purpose was to help alleviate another pandemic after the scare from the Swine Flu. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
- wasdfff 6y agoKn95 and kf94 are readily available and cheap in Los Angeles. I cannot believe healthcare authorities would rather have workers use a month old n95 that degrades after 72hours of use than a kn95 that is readily available in the area and costs $1.
- hikerclimber 6y agobad they should do there job regardless of whether they have ppe. thats what you sign up for.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoDoes anyone have a link to more context about the strike? I found this on the union website— http://www.seiu121rn.org/2020/11/29/press-release-nurses-healthcare-professionals-at-los-robles-regional-medical-center-hold-informational-picket/ http://www.seiu121rn.org/2020/11/29/press-release-nurses-hea...
- everybodyknows 6y agoThis is the critical bottleneck to supply: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-filters/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...
- maxkwallace 6y agoNurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers in the US are being taken advantage of right now and threatening a strike is one of the few ways they can maintain a balance of power in the system. I support the strike and I hope the folks ignoring covid precautions understand there is a limited supply of goodwill and of people who can save your ass if you get a bad case. Doctors arguably have it worse right now because due to how they're employed, a good number of them have no legal ability to unionize or engage in collective bargaining. Average med school debt at graduation is roughly $200k. Now imagine you are a recent graduate from residency or medical school, and you have a comorbidity or risk factor for severe covid. Unless you have some outside funding source to pay your debt, you have no choice not to work, likely in a hospital that has little incentive to keep you safe. Even ignoring tuition, there is a massive opportunity cost to training a doctor, and these are the folks we're relying on to keep us healthy for decades into the future. Situation's pretty shit. Least we could do is lock down until every healthcare worker has been vaccinated.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoIf I were a medical worker, and they gave me shit PPE and told me that I'm not allowed to use my own - I'd simply ignore them until I was fired. It's gonna suck dying if I need to go to the hospital, but I don't blame the nurses at all for this
- webmaven 6y ago> If I were a medical worker, and they gave me shit PPE and told me that I'm not allowed to use my own - I'd simply ignore them until I was fired. You'd not only be risking your job, but your license as well (as in, future employment in your field).
- SauciestGNU 6y agoYeah, but you'd (probably) be alive. It's an optimization problem, where at some point in the curve it becomes more expensive to follow the guidelines (and die) than be blacklisted from the profession.
- webmaven 6y agoWe'll know next year how much worse the odds of actually dying from Covid-19 were as a nurse in unsafe conditions vs. as an unemployed ex-nurse. I'm far from certain that deciding to stay on the job isn't a rational choice. It depends on how much losing your job actually lets you lower your odds of getting Covid-19, and whether, once sick, Covid-19 survival rates are different for healthcare workers.
- eplanit 6y agoDoesn't the California Nurses Union strike almost regularly, anyway? Assuming that nurses have a better understanding of the virus than average laypeople, and given the facts of the number of positive cases, plus the facts which undermine the claims (California seems to actually have a stockpile), it seems unprofessional and unethical in the extreme to strike at this time.
- wilsonrocks 6y agoSomebody will always tell you that you are unprofessional and unethical if you strike, in my experience. Source: years as a workplace rep in UK school under austerity government cutting public sector pay and pensions, plus 3 years as a branch secretary.
- tokai 6y agoYou would think that standing up against practises that are endangering health-worker's health, and in tow the health of their patients, would be the most professional thing to do.
- Baeocystin 6y agoI have family who work as nurses on the front lines. One of them just got back from her third shift in a week in the covid unit, and has had a grand total of one reused N95 mask to use, in flagrant violation of what is considered acceptable barrier practice. And this is at one of the biggest hospitals in California. The way the staff are being treated is despicable, and I 100% support any striking action by the Nurses' union.
- Spooky23 6y agoHospital management will do all sorts of stuff to undermine unions. The conflicts vary from pay to operational practice. One of the issues I heard about is that some hospitals are accused of keeping PPE supplies tight so that they can reuse them and save money. If supplies aren't tight, they cannot reuse. In a local city in the northeast, a hospital working to break a nascent nurses union took the step of shipping in scabs from Georgia and Florida, housing and feeding them in a hotel, transporting in shared vans, etc in the middle of a pandemic.
- cronix 6y agoIn 2006, CA Gov. Schwarzenegger spent $200 Million dollars on stockpiling PPE and ventilators. This was on the heel of the Swine Flu in order to leave the state better prepared in case of another pandemic. The stockpile took about $5 Million a year to maintain after the initial $200M purchase. In 2011, CA Gov. Brown got rid of the program to save that $5M/yr. https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-medical-reserve-with-acute-care-beds-ventilators-and-n95-masks-and-let-it-collapse/ https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-... https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/schwarzenegger-shortsighted-for-california-to-defund-pandemic-stockpile-he-built-1269954 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/31/...
- soperj 6y agoSwine flu pandemic was in 2009. Your timeline is off.
- alecco 6y agoArticle says avian flu. Not important to OP's point.
- cronix 6y agoSorry, it was "avian flu". From the article... > In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.
- soperj 6y agoThanks! Just letting you know (no big deal clearly).
- bioinformatics 6y agoDamn Orange man and his failed policies.
- Simulacra 6y agoUnpopular opinion: Unions should not be allowed to strike during an emergency.
- yellowapple 6y agoPerhaps if hospitals actually gave the slightest damn about their employees' safety, said employees wouldn't feel the need to strike during an emergency?
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe US has been in a continuous state of national emergency (usually multiple overlapping ones) since the 1970s, and that's without “during an emergency” automatically voiding labor rights. If an emergency justifies conscription, then the necessary personnel should be conscripted; if it doesn't, there is no cause to waive labor rights, which exist specifically to assure that labor is genuinely consensual and not a matter of economic coercion.
- legitster 6y agoThis was a huge failure on the federal government. All they had to do was guarantee to buy up a minimum number of masks at a reasonable price, which would have been the reasonable thing to do anyway (even if there was overproduction, they can start a new stockpile). A lot of new manufacturers were willing to dump costs into tooling up production if they knew there would be demand in a year or two for the product. But because the government waffled so long, and kept casting doubt even on the length of the pandemic, barely anyone was willing to dump the money into production. As I understand it, the current situation is that the majority of manufacturers for N95 masks today were the same ones that existed in 2019.
- satisfaction 6y agoYou can thank those politicians and those electors that voted for them that made it cost effective for textile manufacturers to move to China.
- underseacables 6y agoI don’t think this is a good idea, and it would be disaster out for the Union if people start dying. I hope there are smarter people out there who will break the strike line.