Nurse union activists organized actions at hospitals across the country yesterday, a national day of action to draw attention to how the U.S.’s profit-driven health care system is failing workers and patients alike.
The actions were coordinated through a series of calls organized by Labor Notes—which has been helping grow a network of rank-and-file nurse activists for more than a year—and were inspired by the protests organized at New York City hospitals in previous weeks.
Nurses and other frontline health care workers used the actions to highlight the disgraceful conditions in many hospitals, where medical staff are struggling to handle the surge of COVID-19 patients with diminishing supplies of respirators, ventilators, and gowns.
Last week activists published a series of demands that included:
The federal government should use the Defense Production Act to produce a surplus of necessary medical supplies. Nationalize the country’s hospitals in order to coordinate the distribution of resources. Expand Medicare so that the tens of millions currently uninsured would have their care paid for. Have frontline workers determine what constitutes safe staffing in every department. Provide frontline workers with childcare and housing during the crisis. Health care workers highlighted how the relentless focus on cutting costs by eliminating any spare capacity left our system incredibly vulnerable to the coronavirus. The solution, they said, is to replace it with one that prioritizes patients over profits.
Here are reports from participants in five locations around the country. —Chris Brooks
everal dozen IBEW utility members have been sequestered at their work sites in California and New York since early April to protect critical power infrastructure and personnel from the threat of COVID-19.
Transmission system operators like San Diego Local 465 members Chris Sullivan, Al Lagunero and Lead Steward Blain Adams-Denner are highly skilled and few in number. Since early April, they have been living and working San Diego Gas & Electric property to protect them from exposure to the novel coronavirus. The IBEW has also signed agreements with dozens more utility companies across the U.S. and Canada, setting the terms for housing the men and women who operate the power grid and run generation plants onsite for shifts lasting as long as four weeks.
“There are some jobs that are essential and can be done from home, some that are essential and can’t, and then there are some jobs that are so specialized, the number of people who can do them so limited, and their job duties so crucial, that they need special protection,” said Utility Department Director Donnie Colston.
It is not the first-time utility workers have sheltered in place. Only so many people can run nuclear or hydroelectric plants or coordinate the operations of the power grid. When hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, or fires threaten to limit access to hydro plants hidden in the mountains of Northern California, provisions have been made for IBEW members to stay on site for a limited time until the crisis has passed.
In some ways the pandemic is just another natural disaster where the power must stay on and the safest place for the people who can do that is right next to machineshttp://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/20Daily/2004/200416_Utility
On March 18 Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), in part to discourage layoffs and in part to guarantee paid leave to workers who need to stay home due to the COVID-19 emergency. On March 27 Congress enacted the CARES Act to expand unemployment insurance eligibility and benefits. Both laws expire on December 31, 2020, unless extended.
What follows is a selection of questions relating to the new laws. Please note that this is a complicated and rapidly changing area. Although the U.S. Department of Labor has issued several regulations and guides, aspects of the programs remain hazy.
Moreover, enforcement is likely to be slow and spotty, as a poorly staffed federal Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor appears unable to effectively oversee the leave program and state UI agencies claim to be overwhelmed by the crush of applications. Union workers should always review their contracts to see if they have stronger protections.
At the end of this week, 43,000 unionized Walt Disney World employees will be furloughed, an unprecedented blow to families throughout the entire central Florida region. On top of the sudden loss of income, workers say that they face an even more immediate threat: the broken Florida unemployment system.
Disney is not just one of Florida’s most important employers—it represents a rare island of union power in a state where less than 7% of workers are union members. A coalition of six unions called the Service Trades Union Council that represents nearly 40,000 Disney workers negotiated an agreement with the company this week that guarantees employees will keep their benefits while they are furloughed, including health insurance. They’re also guaranteed the right to go back to their old jobs, with the same wages and seniority, when the theme parks finally reopen. Most of the employees stopped working in mid-March, but secured five weeks of pay. After April 19, however, they are on their own.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that these newly furloughed workers are now being forced to apply for unemployment benefits in Florida all at once—a virtual impossibility, since the state’s unemployment system is already overwhelmed, dysfunctional, and incapable of delivering the benefits that are owed to everyone who has found themselves newly without a job in recent weeks.
Among the most prominent victims of the coronavirus financial crisis is the United States Postal Service, which could quite literally run out of money to operate if the federal government does not approve a rescue package for it soon. The Trump administration—which, like much of the GOP, has long advocated for cutbacks and privatization of the postal service—actively prevented the USPS from being bailed out in the CARES Act, even as Donald Trump has made a show of publicly thanking Fedex and UPS for their work. Not very subtle.
Fifty years ago last month, U.S. postal workers staged an unprecedented and historic eight-day strike, backing down the Nixon administration and winning the right to collective bargaining. A half century later, Mark Dimondstein, the leader of the 200,000-strong American Postal Workers Union, says that the Trump administration is using today’s crisis as an opportunity to destroy the postal service as a public entity once and for all. In These Times spoke to Dimondstein about the existential peril facing postal workers, and what they plan to do about it.
Torabs
Much solidarity with the USPS. Don’t these freeloading ecommerce companies realize their livelihood is also on the line?
If the workers and the union want to shut the whole thing down, I support them.
November 2008, Rahm Emanuel, then-chief of staff for president-elect Barack Obama, told a crowd of corporate executives: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Great Recession’s historic economic downturn was by then in full tilt, which Emanuel saw as an opportunity to pursue bold policy ideas. “And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
While the Obama administration’s response to the crisis included some important reform measures, such as the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, bold progressive policy change was hard to come by. In fact, the financial institutions whose thirst for profit had brought the global economy to its knees ended up even bigger and more powerful than before.
Now, 12 years after Emanuel offered that advice, corporate America seems to have again taken heed. As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded, corporate forces and conservative politicians have teamed up to cut regulations, roll back worker rights, restrict freedom, and otherwise take advantage of the turmoil
.
polarbear4
and all the dem faithful will not even realize what is happening bc it’s their guy and bc MSM sez all good.
Every week, we bring you a roundup of the top news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here’s the latest edition of the Working People Weekly List.
Book TV this morning features the marriage of a wealthy man and a jewish immigrant who worked in a factory which was a big deal at the time and for part of her life she was the most covered woman in America.
They both joined the the Socialist Party and were very active in union organizing early in the 1900’s.
The life of immigrants in the tenements in NYC with several people to a room and many without rest rooms, was squalid and bleak. The same issues of income disparity are still here in health care and income and the distance between the 1% and us is even greater.
A question was asked about Bernie Sanders. The author responds that socialists of the period of the book would not recognize him as a socialist. He is more of a European welfare state person. Thus not a radical at all in terms of the so called far left of people like Chris Hedges.
In “Rebel Cinderella,” Adam Hochschild writes movingly about an unlikely pair who also served as a potent symbol. The public was so fascinated by the couple that some Americans kept scrapbooks documenting Rose’s fairy-tale ascent. For several years, she was mentioned in the press more than any other American woman. Hochschild notes that as the Gilded Age yielded to the Progressive Era, Rose and Graham seemed like the ideal embodiment of socialist ambitions: “What could better symbolize the hope of human brotherhood than such a marriage of rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, Gentile and Jew?”
When Rose met Graham she was working as a reporter for The Jewish Daily News (a job she was offered after writing an occasional column about factory life), living on the Lower East Side as the sole breadwinner in a household that included four of her younger siblings and their mother. Graham had a medical degree and was living in settlement housing, where the wealthy lived alongside the poor, which appealed to his sense of noblesse oblige. He was charmed by her, recounting in a letter how much he enjoyed her 25th birthday, when she invited him to her humble apartment and offered him a glass of milk, bread and butter, an egg and a banana. She was charmed by him, too, recalling years later that he had reminded her of “the young Abe Lincoln.”
Joe Biden is allowing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to keep the delegates his presidential campaign has won thus far as the former vice president works to avoid dividing the Democratic Party’s base.
Sanders, who suspended his presidential campaign last week, would normally be forced to forfeit a third of the delegates he’s garnered to Biden under a strict interpretation of Democratic Party rules.
However, behind-the-scenes negotiations have been ongoing between the Biden and Sanders campaigns to allow the Vermont lawmaker to keep his delegates as a gesture of goodwill, though it is still not settled how many Sanders would be able to keep.
“We feel strongly that it is in the best interest of the party to ensure that the Sanders campaign receives statewide delegates to reflect the work that they have done to contribute to the movement that will beat Donald Trump this fall,” a Biden official told The Hill. “We are in discussion with them now on how to best accomplish that.”
Candidates’ total delegate hauls are split between those allocated by congressional district and those based on statewide results. To keep the statewide delegates, candidates must still be running for president when the people who will represent them at the convention are selected by states.
Most states have yet to select the people who will attend the convention as delegates.
Under the rules, Biden would normally get 346 of the delegates won by Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). Sanders’s delegate count would drop to 628, according to an AP analysis.
Someone mentioned Bernie needed 1200 by primary end to have an influence on the soon to be forgotten DNC Platform. So I guess the DNC will give him a thousand out of the goodness of their hearts and offer some low hanging fruit and they’ll forget it anyway if they would happen to win in Nov. The so called “winner” will be dealing with CV-19 and a depression worse than 08 possibly the 1930s. They better focus getting food to everyone because if that goes down, That’s when the pitchforks come out in earnest.
Don midwest
the movement is alive and a new article just out. The paragraphs below are a summary of Corey Robin’s life and work and end with questions about the Bernie movement.
As much as Robin writes for media outlets, by habit he thinks of the longue durée more than the news cycle. The pandemic crisis may offer, as his essay for us this week outlined, some opportunities for progressive political change—but, as he says, there is no such thing as “destiny” in politics. With that in mind, I asked him how he saw these last few years of Bernie Sanders’s career.
“I’m less interested in Sanders than I am in the movement that has grown up around him,” he said. He acknowledged the current disappointment of Sanders supporters. “But if you look at the organizational infrastructure that is slowly being built, particularly at the local level; if you look at the developing political consciousness among what the syndicalists used to call the ‘militant minority’; if you look at the decreasing hold that neoliberal ideas have among people under forty and among rank and file Democrats… I think all of this adds up to a much more promising moment than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.
“I’m fifty-two, and for most of my life, all the energy and ascendancy has been on the right,” he concluded. “That’s just not the case anymore.”
Mary Shippee voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary this month, well after it was clear he had no chance to become the party’s presidential nominee.
Now that Mr. Sanders has dropped out and endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Shippee is torn over whether to once again cast a vote for a moderate Democrat in November, after grudgingly supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Barack Obama in 2012.
“What it feels like is the Democratic Party relies on guilting progressives into voting for them, and they don’t want to have any meaningful changes,” said Ms. Shippee, 31, a nursing student in Milwaukee. “For the third election in a row, to have a candidate you’re not excited about makes me a little more interested in voting third party.”
Despite Mr. Sanders’s call to unite behind Mr. Biden to defeat President Trump — whom the Vermont senator described as “the most dangerous president” of modern times — and despite Mr. Obama’s assurance that the party had moved left since he left office, the youthful and impassioned army of Sanders supporters is far from ready to embrace a nominee so unlike the one they pinned their dreams on.
In interviews with two dozen Sanders primary voters across the country this week, there was a nearly universal lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Some called him a less formidable candidate than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. Many were skeptical of his ability to beat Mr. Trump. Others were quick to critique Mr. Biden’s sometimes incoherent speech.
Taken together, the voters’ doubts raised questions about how many would show up for Mr. Biden in November, including their likelihood to volunteer and organize for him, an important measure of enthusiasm. In a poll last month, four out of five Sanders supporters said they would vote for Mr. Biden, with 15 percent saying they would cross over to Mr. Trump, about the same share that did so in 2016.
It is clear, if it wasn’t already, that the Sanders base is far different from the supporters of moderate candidates in the primaries, who moved on quickly from their first choices to coalesce around Mr. Biden early last month. For Mr. Sanders, bringing his people on board will not be easy, even though he endorsed Mr. Biden with seeming affection and months earlier than he did Mrs. Clinton in 2016.
Certainly, as polling shows, the majority of Sanders voters plan to support Mr. Biden. Most of those interviewed who intend to do so called it a hold-your-nose election.
“I will vote for him; Biden is better than Trump, sure,” said Stephen Phillips, 33, who lives in Lakeland, Fla., and has been furloughed from his job in talent recruitment because of the coronavirus outbreak. But he cringed watching Mr. Sanders’s live-streamed endorsement of Mr. Biden on Monday, when the senator spoke extemporaneously while the former vice president seemed to be reading off cue cards. “This guy is going to be running against Donald Trump, who off the cuff can destroy anybody with words.”
Maria Aviles-Hernandez, 24, a Spanish teacher near Rocky Mount, N.C., didn’t vote in 2016 but plans to support Mr. Biden, although Mr. Sanders was her first choice. “I will vote this year, I will make sure of that,” she said. “I didn’t expect Trump to win the first time. The world just surprised me. I don’t want that to happen again.”
A challenge for Mr. Biden in the fall is that even if he has the grudging support of Sanders voters, many may not go out of their way to vote, either by applying for absentee ballots or by traveling home if they are students.
In eastern Iowa on Tuesday, Kelly Manning had just finished her route as a letter carrier for the Postal Service, which has lost millions in revenue during the pandemic even as Mr. Trump tries to block relief funding for the agency. Ms. Manning, 55, caucused for Mr. Sanders in Burlington, on the Mississippi River. She heard Mr. Biden speak when he came through Iowa, though she said he had made her nearly doze off.
“I’ll hold my nose and vote for Biden,” she said.
Her 31-year-old son, Mason Blow, is another matter. A staunch Sanders supporter, he voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. Ms. Manning said she and her sister were “working on him” to vote for Mr. Biden, to prevent a second Trump term.
“He said he won’t vote for Biden, he’s going to write in Bernie this time,” Ms. Manning said. “The younger people, they’re not used to having their dream crushed as we are.”
polarbear4
“The younger people, they’re not used to having their dream crushed as we are.”
i will do what i can to break this. it will never get easier. the other candidate will only get worse. and the way the dems vote for most of he wants tells me all i need to know.
polarbear4
enough dems will vote for biden. not sure about independents. machines will play their part.
The largely white male protesters against social distancing measures to protect the public from COVID-19 are like Rosa Parks, who waged a historic battle for racial equality, right-wing economist and White House adviser Stephen Moore insisted in an astonishing claim on Friday.
“I call these people modern-day Rosa Parks. They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” Moore told The Washington Post.
He also told CBS News: “It’s interesting to me that the right has become more the Rosa Parks of the world than the left is.” He insisted to The New York Times: “We need to be the Rosa Parks here, and protest against these government injustices.”
Moore is a member of President Donald Trump’s back-to-work council and part of a coalition of conservative leaders called “Save Our Country,” working against business shutdowns and stay-at-home measures aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19. He dropped out of consideration to serve on the Federal Reserve Board last year amid concerns about his qualifications and mounting opposition to his controversial comments about gender and race. He once quipped that Trump’s first act as president would be to kick a black family (the Obamas) out of public housing (the White House), according to The Atlantic.
Let’s not normalize this: the President of the United States is encouraging citizens to engage in armed rebellion.
He sent this tweet a day after his supporters showed up with assault weapons at state capitols. He knows what’s he’s doing. https://t.co/25XGY5BbmA
If Trump Thinks It’s Safe for His Followers to Gather at Protests, Why Won’t He Attend One?
FROM A VERY safe distance on Friday, Donald Trump urged his supporters to risk infection with the deadly coronavirus by attending in-person protests to “liberate” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia from stay-at-home orders issued by their Democratic governors.
The president, who is pursuing a transparent strategy of encouraging voters to blame the governors of states led by his political rivals for the economic hardship caused by the lockdowns he has endorsed, tweeted his support for the protests he learned about from Fox News.
The people protesting stay-at-home order in #Lansing right now are mostly white, wearing Trump hats, and flying Confederate flags.
I couldn't help but wonder as I photographed today's Minnesota protest.
1. How many didn't know they had it when they came here? 2. How many will get it here today? 3. Did I safely avoid it while doing my job?#COVID19pic.twitter.com/ms9aJEelC1
Numerous commentators remarked yesterday on the meaning of all that (note, too, how “Total Information Awareness” was a major scandal in the Bush years, but “Information Dominance Center” – along with things like “Boundless Informant” – are treated as benign or even noble programs in the age of Obama).
But now, on the website of DBI Architects, Inc. of Washington and Reston, Virginia, there are what purports to be photographs of the actual Star-Trek-like headquarters commissioned by Gen. Alexander that so impressed his Congressional overseers. It’s a 10,740 square foot labyrinth in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The brochure touts how “the prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22′-0″ wide projection screen”:
wpDiscuz
https://labornotes.org/2020/04/nurses-across-us-protest-dangerous-conditions-and-profit-health-care
everal dozen IBEW utility members have been sequestered at their work sites in California and New York since early April to protect critical power infrastructure and personnel from the threat of COVID-19.
Transmission system operators like San Diego Local 465 members Chris Sullivan, Al Lagunero and Lead Steward Blain Adams-Denner are highly skilled and few in number. Since early April, they have been living and working San Diego Gas & Electric property to protect them from exposure to the novel coronavirus.
The IBEW has also signed agreements with dozens more utility companies across the U.S. and Canada, setting the terms for housing the men and women who operate the power grid and run generation plants onsite for shifts lasting as long as four weeks.
“There are some jobs that are essential and can be done from home, some that are essential and can’t, and then there are some jobs that are so specialized, the number of people who can do them so limited, and their job duties so crucial, that they need special protection,” said Utility Department Director Donnie Colston.
It is not the first-time utility workers have sheltered in place. Only so many people can run nuclear or hydroelectric plants or coordinate the operations of the power grid. When hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, or fires threaten to limit access to hydro plants hidden in the mountains of Northern California, provisions have been made for IBEW members to stay on site for a limited time until the crisis has passed.
In some ways the pandemic is just another natural disaster where the power must stay on and the safest place for the people who can do that is right next to machineshttp://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/20Daily/2004/200416_Utility
http://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/20Daily/2004/200416_Utility
https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/04/what-are-my-rights-paid-leave-and-unemployment-during-pandemic
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22468/furloughed-disney-workers-florida-unemployment-coronavirus
T and R, la58!! 🙂 The Tragic Kingdom is a big cheese in the Orlando area.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22470/mark_dimondstein_apwu_union_post_office_shut_down_trump_gop
Much solidarity with the USPS. Don’t these freeloading ecommerce companies realize their livelihood is also on the line?
If the workers and the union want to shut the whole thing down, I support them.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22467/corporations-crisis-coronavirus-covid-19-shock-doctrineIn
.
and all the dem faithful will not even realize what is happening bc it’s their guy and bc MSM sez all good.
https://aflcio.org/2020/4/15/finding-ways-help-working-people-weekly-list
The floor/ soap box is open.
I drive by Kate Pierson’s Lazy Meadow motel every time I drive up to the Catskills. Cute promo
Have you stop in for the night?
No. We are heading to our place about 45 minutes further.
🙂
Excellent article about how the democratic establishment zapped Bernie
#DemExit Now: How the Democratic Party Cheated Bernie Sanders Out of the Nomination
Book TV this morning features the marriage of a wealthy man and a jewish immigrant who worked in a factory which was a big deal at the time and for part of her life she was the most covered woman in America.
They both joined the the Socialist Party and were very active in union organizing early in the 1900’s.
The life of immigrants in the tenements in NYC with several people to a room and many without rest rooms, was squalid and bleak. The same issues of income disparity are still here in health care and income and the distance between the 1% and us is even greater.
A question was asked about Bernie Sanders. The author responds that socialists of the period of the book would not recognize him as a socialist. He is more of a European welfare state person. Thus not a radical at all in terms of the so called far left of people like Chris Hedges.
The Unlikely Life of a Socialist Activist Resonates a Century Later
The above is a book review in NYT.
link to BookTV
Rebel Cinderella:
Historian Adam Hochschild recalled the early 20th century Russian emigre Rose Pastor Stokes, who was a founding member of America’s Communist Party and married to New York millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes
💕
The statewide delegates are in question.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/493454-biden-campaign-seeks-to-let-sanders-keep-his-delegates-in-unusual-move
Someone mentioned Bernie needed 1200 by primary end to have an influence on the soon to be forgotten DNC Platform. So I guess the DNC will give him a thousand out of the goodness of their hearts and offer some low hanging fruit and they’ll forget it anyway if they would happen to win in Nov. The so called “winner” will be dealing with CV-19 and a depression worse than 08 possibly the 1930s. They better focus getting food to everyone because if that goes down, That’s when the pitchforks come out in earnest.
the movement is alive and a new article just out. The paragraphs below are a summary of Corey Robin’s life and work and end with questions about the Bernie movement.
his new article
What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy
where do we go from here
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/politics/bernie-sanders-voters-biden.html
i will do what i can to break this. it will never get easier. the other candidate will only get worse. and the way the dems vote for most of he wants tells me all i need to know.
enough dems will vote for biden. not sure about independents. machines will play their part.
How COVID-19 Showed America’s Dependence on Blue-Collar Workers
I don’t recall Rosa carrying ak-47s
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stephen-moore-trump-covid-19-rosa-parks_n_5e9a8fa8c5b635d25d6cc480
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/18/trump-urges-followers-risk-lives-rallies-wont-attend/
Look at the size of these groups. I wouldn’t call them a “crowd.”
If you look at photos of these gatherings, there aren’t many people in them.
Just Stupid Hu-manns and they get to procreate yeesh!!!!
Rosa Parks. And the NSA guy thinks he’s Picard.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek