NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2009
Workshop Talks
Dollars outshout healthcare workers
by Htun Lin
Obama recently singled out Kaiser HMO as a model for low-cost efficient healthcare, citing the care his grandmother got in Hawaii. Our CEO sent a memo congratulating us Kaiser employees. How did they show their appreciation? We were immediately hit with notices of impending layoffs to achieve more cost control.
This is supposedly due to the new economic environment and anticipated "revenue losses." Kaiser says companies it serves are closing and reducing our membership. New state mandates for cost controls are expected with plans to extend coverage. With the projected change coming from national healthcare reform, Kaiser is worried about the loss of windfall profits coming from years of gouging seniors through "Senior Advantage" plans. But Kaiser is now poised to expand by leaps and bounds. The real motivation behind the layoff scare is to extract further concessions from us.
The debates taking place in the media over healthcare reform need a reality check from workers who actually provide the care. The truth is that every ounce of quality care that Kaiser manages to deliver is a result of prolonged struggles by frontline healthcare providers. Care is delivered in spite of years of reducing frontline staff and elimination of hospital beds, even shutting down whole wards. Kaiser management at each stage was on the other side of battle lines drawn first by nurses in their struggle for quality care.
Kaiser managers were helped in maneuvering around the quality care struggle by traitorous union leaders like Andy Stern, whose brainchild was a Labor Management Partnership (LMP). The LMP was timed to defuse the quality care struggle. After having heard nothing in all these years from Stern since the partnership was implemented, he plastered the workplace with a clever leaflet recently with the slogans "Partnership Not Layoff!" and "Make the Partnership Work!" He is portraying himself as our advocate out to save our jobs.
This sounded good at first, as though Stern were trying to make up for his recent dictatorial takeover of the local union. The truth is that the national contract, including the partnership agreement, is coming up for review and negotiation in 2010. Kaiser management is thinking ahead. In order to prevent rank-and-file resistance to further concessionary demands from the partnership unions, what is better than to send out notices threatening layoffs? Stern is actively collaborating in this ruse by urging us union members to come up with our own ideas to help the company cut costs in order to "save our jobs."
PROFITS FROM LAYOFFS
He equates assisting management cost control with job security. Everyone knows that cost control means job insecurity--the ability of management to eliminate jobs at will. Kaiser is not unique in this. Many companies reported increased profits last quarter not through expanding production but rather through massive layoffs. Kaiser, which is expanding and supposedly non-profit, is playing the same game.
The current healthcare debate is obsessed over divvying up the healthcare dollar pie. That debate is in a totally different world from what is really going on in the clinics and wards. In this world there has been a struggle against the concrete effects of cost cutting for years. As for Obama's praise for his grandmother's care, a lot of us on the front lines of care at Kaiser say if our mothers were sick we would not want her in the hospital where we work.
EMPTY RIGHTS
For example, after an inspection from the state exposed many violations of patient care standards, Kaiser Oakland is obligated to find a bed within a half hour once a doctor orders a patient admitted. The nurse supervisor is now forced to arbitrarily assign a room number, even if that room has no bed ready, no nurse and no equipment for that patient. This new procedure may satisfy bureaucrats with their paperwork but in reality the patient doesn't get to a bed for several hours. The only genuine healthcare reform is one that focuses on the relationship between patients and their caregivers. What Kaiser, the politicians, and union heads like Stern are peddling is not healthcare reform but restructuring healthcare according to capital's need in this era. For them there is no alternative to capitalism. There will be no resolving this ongoing crisis without overcoming the alienation experienced by workers in their daily activity.
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