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Workshop Talks
March 2001
Divide and conquer
by Htun Lin
All Kaiser hospital workers, including myself, just attended an all day
orientation promoting the labor-management partnership to front-line health
care workers. The precondition for this is that Kaiser remain a financially
successful organization, which has meant drastic staff reductions and
patient care cutbacks over the last five years.
All day long they emphasized the importance of all union workers joining
forces with management in this partnership to help them compete against the
for-profit sharks in the market place. In other words, nothing in the
partnership challenges the logic of finance capital's restructuring of
health care over the last decade-nothing addresses the daily stress over
cutbacks in available beds, lack of adequately trained nurses, and lack of
supplies and equipment.
It was ironic that they showed a labor history video about the fight
against Taylorism. Workers fought Taylorism's job redesign, speed-up as
well as de-skilling of jobs, job fragmentation and time study. That is the
primary concern of rank-and-file workers under this partnership, which
accelerated de-skilling, speed-up and fragmenting nursing. The new
functions, however, create new union positions for a cooperative union.
'PARTNERSHIP' RESCUES BUREAUCRATS
Our orientation was full of the rhetoric that "quality care" is the main
goal of the partnership. We workers remember that Kaiser CEO David Lawrence
initially ignored AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's offer of "strategic
partnership." Then right in the midst of the successful 1997-98 strikes by
the California Nurses Association (CNA) over quality care, Lawrence found
an escape hatch in Sweeney's offer and they jointly announced the new
"strategic partnership" in December 1997.
Part of the partnership agreement is that the AFL-CIO can organize any new
employees as Kaiser expands. The biggest AFL-CIO union here, SEIU Local
250, has been on an aggressive organizing campaign taking the mantle of
"quality care." However this has not been on the basis of solidarity with
nurses but rather as an adversary. Their special treatment in organizing is
payoff for their partnership which was designed to undermine cross-union
rank-and-file solidarity.
Sweeney seems to have discovered a new language of internationalism in an
attempt to co-opt and at the same time undermine the independent
rank-and-file anti-globalization movement. He spoke in Davos, Switzerland,
saying "trade is an economic tool to meet the ends of development,
democracy and a better deal for working people and their families around
the globe."
When has trade ever been an "economic tool" to meet the needs of human
development, democracy, and a better deal for working people? How can even
capitalists with good intentions achieve these goals (much less labor
bureaucrats) when the primary goal of global trade is to serve the
self-expansion of capital? Marx answered this question indirectly when he
exclaimed that in place of all the inalienable freedoms, the bourgeoisie
substitutes a single freedom: free trade.
NURSES UNION UNINVITED
Many service workers asked about the glaring absence of registered nurses
at the orientation. Many of us service workers had joined the nurses on
their picket line because they led the way in raising quality care as a
central contract issue. They won despite management's all out effort to
fight them-a fight which included initiating a partnership with leaders of
other unions. Today's partnership wants us to forget the real source of
quality care as a worker's issue.
When the partnership was announced, SEIU refused to officially honor the
nurses' picket lines. Now we see a glaring lack of CNA support at our
service worker pickets against Sutter Health Care. CNA removed from their
own contract a clause which allowed CNA members to honor picket lines of
striking workers in other unions. CNA leadership put in writing what Local
250 did in practice when the partnership was announced, in other words,
selling out other workers who happen to be in other unions.
A CNA nurse said this unilateral action passed after an abruptly called
meeting where discussion was prematurely cut off. She said this was
reminiscent of the dictatorial tactics used by the American Nurses
Association which the present leadership ousted years ago when they created
CNA as an autonomous and much more democratic union.
What is important to us workers is not petty disputes between union
leaders. What is important is the shared experience we have in struggling
against this restructuring in our everyday working lives and finding a
solution from that perspective.
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